Like photon torpedoes! <csi type="miami">YEEEAAAAAHHHH!</csi>

To be clear for anyone reading this - use cvs2svn to convert your CVS repository to git. It's the only tool that does it right!

Use cvs2svn to convert your existing CVS repositories.

The tools that come with git for converting CVS to git do not work. You will see other posts about how git is different, such as how it manages commits versus files. CVS manages files, and doesn't track them well.

It has no ideas of when a branch ends, and even when they start is a bit iffy. Add to that the fact that CVS lets you pick and choose random files to be on a branch, then you can really start to get into a strange state.

For our CVS repository (goes back to 2001, we had 100's of branches, maybe 1000 tags), the git cvsimport tool placed code from our current development trunk into older versions. I'm sure you can see how bad that is.

After getting burned by that, we turned to cvs2svn. It took a long time (8 hours) to convert, but it converted correctly, and you only ever have to do it once.

My advice is to convert your repository, then check out random versions from both CVS and git, then run a diff on all the branches of importance. I wrote a script to do it for all branches and tags because I got burned the first time.