Fortunately for those of us who are still forced to use CVS, git provides pretty good tools to do exactly what you're wanting to do. My suggestions (and what we do here at $work): Creating the Initial Clone Use git cvsimport to clone the CVS revision history into a git repository. I use the following invocation: % git cvsimport -d $CVSROOT -C dir_to_create -r cvs -k \ -A /path/to/authors/file cvs_