'git-cvs push' doesn't seem to track last push

[von]

I set up a new git repository per the README, made changes and did a 'git-cvs push' and all worked fine. Then I made more changes and tried to do a 'git-cvs push' again and it fails because it ties to re-push the changes I made for the first commit.

I've verified if I manually select the commits and use 'git-cvs push --commits commits' it works.

What I am missing in terms of have git-cvs track previous commits that have been pushed? Thanks.

[wu-lee]

Firstly, thank you and congratulations on being the first self-confessed user of git-cvs! I wasn't aware of anyone else using it so far.

Now, to try and help you - I'm guessing you're doing something like this?

$ mkdir repo_name
$ cd repo_name
$ echo cvsroot=$CVS_ROOT >.git-cvs
$ echo cvsmodule=$CVS_MODULE >>.git-cvs
$ git-cvs pull
$ echo hello > foo
$ git commit -a -m "comitted foo"
$ git-cvs push
$ echo hello again >>foo
$ git commit -a -m "comitted foo again"
$ git-cvs push # some error here?

I've created a unit test which tries to replicate this, called t/von-1.t. You might want to check this does indeed replicate your problem (I've checked it in).

Basically, you're quite right, it doesn't track previous pushes, it only knows where the last merge back from the CVS remote branch occured, and pushes everything since then.

I personally avoid this problem by git-cvs-pulling after each push (followed by a git reset --hard master to clean away the local branch prior to the merge).

This is not ideal, but at the time I simply had to get on with some paid work rather than tweaking my tools.

It could probably be fixed and made more like git-push, with some thought. I suspect I'd need to bone up on how git-push works, but i'm guessing git-cvs push would need to do roughly what I currently do manually: cvsimport first to get an changes since we last looked, merge or rebase the working branch with the updated CVS remote branch, exportcommit the commits since the merge point, and finally cvsimport again, to get back the results of our push. Finally, it needs to remove the merge commit from our history (because of the way git rev-list works, see _generate_commits()). This seems unwieldy, but currently I don't have a better way.

I've added some commented git-cvs pulls and git-logs to the test to illustrate what I mean (this in a separate commit).

[von]

Thanks for the response.

First, I verified that von-1.t does indeed replicate my error. I also see a number of errors like the following, which I believe is unrelated:
*git log --graph --all
fatal: invalid --pretty format: %h=%s%d%n

However, I tried, as you suggest, doing a 'git-cvs pull; git reset --hard master' following by a 'git-cvs pull' to no avail, it still returns the same error. See the following gist for output:

http://gist.github.com/236601

In this particular case "7eaf30388a822b820affb1b43ff5fe64281980ff" is the only commit that should be committed by the 'git-cvs push'.

[von]

Looks like my remotes/cvs/HEAD ref is getting updated correct and I've tracked my problem to the 'git rev-list' which is returning longer list of commits that just those between remotes/cvs/HEAD and master. See: http://gist.github.com/237535

I'm not quite sure why it's doing that. Hitting the edge of my git understanding.

For the state shown if I prune the commit list to "dd807c1d5e39ecd32ed616f5e07228004ce899e6" (one past remotes/cvs/HEAD) on, it git-cvs push'es just fine.

[von]

OK, I think I understand the problem, which is I've got forks in my git commits. They look something like this (which is simplified): http://gist.github.com/240178

Don't understand the cause of this or it's cure yet.

[von]

Figured out the cause. If you do this:

1. git commit...
2. git-cvs push
3. git commit # instead of git-cvs pull
   4 git-cvs pull

You now have branches from step 3 and step 4.

I'm not git expert enough to fix this at this point. I'll probably just do my git-cvs repo from CVS and as the joke goes "don't do that".

This issue can be closed.

[von]

Apparently I can't close the issue.

[von]

Actually, I was still having similar problems after this. Poking around the tests I see you are not doing "git reset --hard master" but instead you are doing "git reset --hard cvs/cvshead". Trying that and things seem to work for me.