On converting from cvs to mercurial

I've got a gigantic CVS repository that I'd like to convert to a few hg repos. This question is similar, but I'm using hg convert and I've got more than one directory in cvs that should go in a given hg repo. Here's an example:

/sw
 .../dir1
 .../dir2
 .../dir3
 .../dir4
 .../dir5

I want dir1, dir2, and dir4 in my hg repo, but dir3 can rot with dir5 in a separate one that nobody will ever use.

I've been converting the whole thing with hg convert --branchsort sw where sw is a sandbox checkout containing only the directories I care about. That nets me a 1.7GB hg repo with all 4 directories. Th开发者_StackOverflow中文版e CVS repo is 2.3GB, but a sandbox is only 159MB. The hg repo has history going back to 1997, which is awesome, but some of the stuff in there is from products that have been discontinued. They don't need to be in a regular developer sandbox.

So, is there a way to cherry pick CVS directories to go into my new hg repository?

You should follow my advice on that question to which you linked. Convert everything together and then use hg -> hg converts to pick the parts you want in each repo using a filemap. Any revisions that would be empty (have only files that you're excluding in that conversation) will be omitted.

Also hg to hg converts are much faster, so you can do the slow CVS convert only once and then do the hg to hg parts again and again until you're happy with the results.

Do you have access to the CVS repository storage?

If yes, then you should be able make a complete copy of the repository, remove any files/directories that you don't want to convert, and then run hg convert with a working directory checked out from this local repository.

I say should because I haven't tried it, but since CVS stores revision history on a per-file basis, there's no reason I can think of that it shouldn't. It would not work with a SCM like Subversion, which stores multiple changes in a single revision.