good to know there is a migration path from RCS to Mercurial. I’ve just done a writeup about how great hg is, but doing so wondered what the future will bring for a few older rcs repositories.

A quick lookup at a major search engine brought me over to your post and gave me this good feeling of “oh yes, we can do a migration any time…” Even the idea of continuing use of trusty rcs for simpler tasks appears future proof when knowing that a switch to hg will always be possible without losing rcs revisions information. Thanks!

First, you’ll need to make sure “convert” is active by adding this to your .hgrc
[extensions]
hgext.convert=

Now, to follow your conventions:
mkdir /var/tmp/mercurial
mkdir /var/tmp/mercurial/cvsroot
cvs -d /var/tmp/mercurial/cvsroot init
cd /var/tmp/mercurial/cvsroot
[and do all that jazz making a "script" subdir, copying ,v files, etc]
cd /var/tmp/mercurial
cvs -d :local:/var/tmp/mercurial/cvsroot co script

so now you have “script” as a sibling of cvsroot, run convert:

hg convert script

and now, behold – hg-script will be your new mercurial repository

cd hg-script
hg status
yep, all there, but need to add
hg add
hg commit

and yer done

RCS to Mercurial isn’t exactly a very common use case after all :)