[ILUG] how to fix multiple broken CVS imports

[Darragh Bailey]

Have an area in a CVS repository at work that was previously setup to
use a vendor branch and import sources. We only actually change about 5
files, and add in 10 additional files. 

That should mean that each time a new version is released by the vendor,
the import should only have 5 conflicts, give or take.


However due to a couple of broken imports, and then use of commits to
bring in the new sources instead of redoing the imports we now have an
absolute mess. Unfortunately I only found this recently and we have
created branch tags in the area as well, which branch off newer
revisions.

This now results in about 150-300 conflicts when importing new sources
(testing with a couple of newer revisions to see what was happening).
Now I haven't been modifying our actual repository, I just copied it
locally and just reset by CVSROOT variable so that I could safely trash
it without mucking up the main repo.


Anyone have any suggestions on how to clean this up and get back to the
situation where importing will only conflict on the changes we make
above the vendor sources.

I have been looking at re-importing the previous sources correctly and
then reseting all the tags we have to point to the earliest equivalent
source file that is exactly the same as what they currently point to.
Then going through the repository and removing and recreating all
branches in that area, till finally deleting all the broken commits.

I really, really, really, don't want to do that, since a) its a PITA,
time consuming and prone to going really badly wrong, and b) its somewhat
defeats the purpost of having source control if I go back and start
removing information from the rcs files.


-- 
Darragh

"Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool."