For a long time, the Concurrent Versions System (CVS) was the standard in versioning software. It is, in essence, a client-server revision control system for software. CVS was written in 1986 by Dick Grune of the University of Amsterdam as a collection of shell scripts called RCS. RCS can only do version management on separate files, so this was a big step forward. In 1989, Brian Berliner made an implementation in C, which has been developed further since; it is a piece of open source software that's distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

In the 2000s, there was a shift to subversion and to decentralized version control software such as Git.

In this chapter, we will compare both versioning systems. After that, we will prepare and run a migration from CVS to Git.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• CVS versus Git
• Preparation for migrating from CVS to Git
• Running the conversion
• Cleaning up after migration