How to work on git branches created by cvsimport?

Question

My man page for git cvsimport says

You should never do any work of your own on the branches that are created by git cvsimport .

There's something here I don't understand. I'm migrating a project from CVS to git. Once I've imported the branches, where am I supposed to do my work? Do I need to clone from the imported repo into another repo?

Can someone explain what the warning in the man page means, and what is going on here? If I can understand what's happening, I can probably figure out what to do.

Answer 1

The warning is more about multiple imports or even export (ie round-trip updates, with git cvsexportcommit )

If you work on branches imported by the git cvsimport tool, you could change its history (with a rebase for instance), making any subsequent import impossible.

I suspect this is similar to the git svn caveat section.
Cloning the imported repo into another one is usually the recommended practice, but only if you intent to do other imports from CVS.