[p4] Remote Depots, CVS Conversions, and Line-Endings

[David Faison]

I am helping another department deploy a new Perforce. They have
existing archives managed under CVS that they want to bring over. The
target platform will be Windows (out of my hands!). The original CVS
system was hosted on Linux, then it was switched to a Windows host
without doing any line-ending conversions on the archives.

I ran the cvs2p4 utility without much trouble, but I still don't have
much faith in the integrity of the resulting archives, because of
potential CR/LF conversion issues that may exist. I am especially wary
of this since the Perforce Tech Staff specifically and strenously warned
me that archives containing inappropriate line-endings relative to the
host platform may seem 'healthy' but can still become corrupted. These
archives are guaranteed to be 'inappropriate' because they have already
been blended to begin with.

The thought of trying to straighten out all the line endings became an
undesireable option when they (P4TechStaff) explained that CVS maintains
binary data in archives sandwiched between textual control records -
meaning that the binary archives would require selectively converting
only the textual regions. Which is more than I want to chew on if I
don't have to!

On a separate note: I have several separate CVS repositories that I must
assimilate into one server. Running the cvs2p4 utility separately
creates separate databases.

My solution to all this is put all of the 'converted' CVS archives into
a separate, remote depots and then branch them back into a single
'working' server. This makes all the history visible, but the underlying
archives are read-only, and therefore will never degrade because of
activity against them (i.e. if they're good today, they're good
forever!).


My question is: what are the downsides that I might not be seeing to
this approach?

Thanks in advance,
David Faison
Photon Research Associates