Annotation of wikisrc/mailing-lists/tech-repository.mdwn, revision 1.16

1.1       spz         1: ## Requirements
                      2: 
                      3: A list of requirements for a possible replacement for CVS as repo software for NetBSD and pkgsrc so we don't keep starting over listing these (and forgetting half) all of the time:
                      4: 
                      5: - the license would be nice to be BSDish, must be open source and free to use
                      6: - the software should be includeable in NetBSD base without too much excess baggage
                      7: - it should be possible to do development on old or small hardware
                      8: - it must support automated updating of source trees
                      9: - it must support branches
                     10: - there should be a conversion for the present history (that actually works)
                     11: - the resulting repository must not break easily
                     12: - the software should be reasonably mature and reliable
1.3       spz        13: - checkout of a pkgsrc tree must be feasible on a 32MB system
                     14: - checkout of a stable pkgsrc tree and then updating select package subdirs to the latest version of the main branch should be possible
                     15: - lasting removal of legally tainted code must be possible
1.1       spz        16: 
                     17: Please add/correct.
                     18: 
                     19: ***
                     20: 
1.2       spz        21: ## Experiences in using the software
                     22: 
1.9       asau       23: ### Experiences with Fossil
                     24: 
                     25: #### Aleksej Saushev (asau)
                     26: 
                     27: I started using it before conversion tool were available
                     28: (basically it isn't available yet, to my knowledge Joerg is working on it),
                     29: in addition I wanted to start as soon as possible
                     30: and to try operation with no conversion tool available.
                     31: Thus I've tried to simulate working with "vendor branches".
                     32: 
                     33: For now Fossil lacks some essential features and has other severe problems:
1.10      asau       34: 
1.14      asau       35: 1. Many operations require javascript-capable web browser.
1.9       asau       36: 1. No support for vendor branches.
1.11      wiki       37: * Redundant to "There's no support for importing vendor source"?
1.12      asau       38: * No, it is different. I would import manually, if only some support were there.
1.9       asau       39: 1. It is impossible to merge between trees growing from the very root.
                     40: The initial commit is too special, this prevents using these trees for vendor branches.
1.11      wiki       41: * Fixed in [4e3cd6ce4e].
1.12      asau       42: * 2010-11-08, not in pkgsrc.
1.9       asau       43: 1. There's no support for importing vendor source,
                     44: even "addremove" command isn't in trunk at the time of writing.
1.11      wiki       45: * It has been merged to trunk and is part of the pkgsrc version.
1.12      asau       46: * No, it isn't part of pkgsrc version at the moment, TIAS.
1.13      wiki       47: * Sorry, you are right. Merged to trunk in [ceab53718f].
1.9       asau       48: 1. Merge state sticks. You can't undo it.
1.11      wiki       49: * Not sure what you mean, but "revert" resets the merge state since [d13054ce84].
1.12      asau       50: * This is quite recent (late October) fix, I didn't check it.
1.9       asau       51: 1. You can't amend your source when you've just merged, you are forced to commit after merge.
1.11      wiki       52: * To clarify, the merge has to be committed first, no separate commits are possible from the checkout before that.
1.14      asau       53: * In practice this makes _critical_ defect in combination of "fossil diff" inability to generate difference for added files.
1.9       asau       54: 1. You can't tune diff command to ignore RCS keywords.
1.11      wiki       55: * Since RCS keywords are not really a native command, it is no surprise. An external diff program can be used for this purpose though.
1.14      asau       56: * Since there's no external diff program that supports it, it is really not quite easy.
1.9       asau       57: 1. You can't diff single file between two given versions.
1.11      wiki       58: * diff --from version1 --to version2 path/to/file
1.12      asau       59: * That didn't work, and I'm not sure it works now. It used to ignore path-to-file argument. (It used to bail out when both "--from" and "--to" were used.)
1.9       asau       60: 1. There's no way to change commit messages.
1.13      wiki       61: * easily done via ui: select a commit and under "Other Links" you can find "Edit" (given the necessary permissions).
1.12      asau       62: * How? It should be possible via command line nevertheless.
1.9       asau       63: 1. There's no documented way to select commit messages of current branch, or branch by given commit id.
                     64: Or there's a bug preventing it.
1.11      wiki       65: * fossil info <commitid>
1.12      asau       66: * This isn't about "info" command, it is about "timeline"
1.13      wiki       67: --> Please clarify what you mean.
1.12      asau       68: * BTW, this command doesn't support "-R" flag, perhaps you have to check the source out to use it.
1.13      wiki       69: 1. Commands are under-documented, usage messages don't list many available options.
1.9       asau       70: This applies to trunk at least, there's a branch that states documentation as its goal.
                     71: 1. There's no convenient way to look at commit contents: files affected, diff.
1.11      wiki       72: * fossil ui and use a web browser
1.12      asau       73: * We don't have web browser in base system, this information should be accessible with command line.
1.9       asau       74: 
1.14      asau       75: 
1.9       asau       76: Some of above problems are reported.
                     77: 
                     78: Note, all problems above are usability problems, I didn't explore e.g. scalability,
                     79: Joerg did and had problems, but this is another story.
                     80: 
1.2       spz        81: ### Experiences with git
                     82: 
1.15      wiki       83: Experience with the imported repositories on morden:
1.16    ! wiki       84: 
1.15      wiki       85: - no problem in principle with the smaller modules like othersrc or htdocs (CVS tags are one off but that is expected)
                     86: - the large repos are really fragile, and gits idea of how to fix a broken repo seems to be to retrieve a copy from someone/somewhere that happens to not be broken
1.2       spz        87: 
                     88: ### Experiences with Subversion
                     89: 
                     90: please fill in
                     91: 
1.8       wiki       92: ### Experiences with Bazaar
                     93: 
                     94: #### Jonathan Perkin (sketch)
                     95: 
                     96: We use bzr at work (MySQL), and while it has a number of problems, it does make dev work easy.
                     97: 
                     98: The Good
                     99: 
                    100: * easy to use
                    101: * shared repositories keep local disk usage down
                    102: * commercial backing (Canonical)
                    103: * cross-platform (works on Windows)
                    104: * numerous GUI available
                    105: 
                    106: The Bad:
                    107: 
                    108: * slow
                    109: * requires python
                    110: 
                    111: The Ugly:
                    112: 
                    113: * can be really slow
                    114: * changing repository formats is a hassle
                    115: 
                    116: A basic example workflow
                    117: 
                    118: <pre>
                    119: # create a local shared repository. all objects are held in a .bzr sub-directory, with branches essentially a lightweight checkout
                    120: $ bzr init-repo bzr
                    121: $ cd bzr
                    122: 
                    123: # fetch HEAD, will take a long time, depending on connectivity
                    124: $ bzr branch bzr+ssh://bzr.netbsd.org/netbsd-trunk
                    125: 
                    126: # fetch netbsd-5, as we already have the majority of the code in netbsd-trunk (and therefore .bzr), this takes a fraction of the time
                    127: $ bzr branch bzr+ssh://bzr.netbsd.org//netbsd-5
                    128: 
                    129: # ok, let's do some dev work
                    130: $ bzr branch netbsd-trunk netbsd-trunk-sketch-fix-msk
                    131: $ cd netbsd-trunk-sketch-fix-msk; hack hack hack
                    132: 
                    133: # the usual cycle of hack/commit/merge
                    134: $ bzr diff # show uncommitted diffs
                    135: $ bzr commit # commit to local clone
                    136: $ bzr merge ../netbsd-trunk # update clone to latest local trunk, OR
                    137: $ bzr merge bzr+ssh://bzr.netbsd.org/netbsd-trunk # merge directly from upstream
                    138: 
                    139: # publish our tree for others to review/hack on
                    140: $ bzr push bzr+ssh://bzr.netbsd.org/netbsd-trunk-fix-msk
                    141: 
                    142: # got reviewed/tested, let's push it
                    143: $ bzr merge bzr+ssh://bzr.netbsd.org/netbsd-trunk
                    144: $ bzr missing bzr+ssh://bzr.netbsd.org/netbsd-trunk # show changeset differences
                    145: $ bzr push bzr+ssh://bzr.netbsd.org/netbsd-trunk
                    146: </pre>
                    147: 
                    148: I personally find this approach a lot more natural than git's way of managing branches itself inside a single working directory.
                    149: 
1.2       spz       150: ***
                    151: 
1.1       spz       152: ## Conversion experiences
                    153: 
1.6       wiki      154: ### git
                    155: 
1.5       wiki      156: Conversion of all modules to git succeeded using fromcvs togit. The resulting git repository of src contains several errors where files have a wrong version (eg in hunt/Makefile the contents of the file on the vendor branch appear as tip of the master branch, which is quite wrong).
                    157: There have been no reports of errors in the other modules; this may be due to a lack of testing.
1.6       wiki      158: 
                    159: ### hg
                    160: 
                    161: Conversion of src failed. Afair the rest worked when using Mercurial 1.3.*. Alas, fromcvs tohg is not compatible with Mercurial 1.4 which is in pkgsrc now and is the version to use with Python 2.6 (afair). Two identified problems:
                    162: <pre>
                    163:         self.ui = ui.ui(interactive = False)
                    164: </pre>
                    165: wants to be
                    166: <pre>
                    167:         self.ui = ui.ui()
                    168:         self.ui.setconfig('ui', 'interactive', 'off')
                    169: </pre>
                    170: in /usr/pkg/share/fromcvs/tohg.py line 10 (easily fixed, obviously)
                    171: and
                    172: <pre>
                    173:         n = self.hgrepo.commit(files = files,
                    174:                                text = text,
                    175:                                user = user,
                    176:                                date = "%s 0" % date,
                    177:                                p1 = p1,
                    178:                                p2 = p2,
                    179:                                extra = {'branch': branch})
                    180: </pre>
                    181: needs to be replaces with something that works with the 1.4 commit that looks like this:
                    182: <pre>
                    183:     def commit(self, text="", user=None, date=None, match=None, force=False,
                    184:                editor=False, extra={}):
                    185: </pre>
                    186: which is where I remembered that I wasn't planning to learn Python this week.
                    187: 
                    188: Next try: hg convert on pkgsrc
                    189: <pre>
                    190: --- /usr/pkg/lib/python2.6/site-packages/hgext/convert/cvsps.py 2009-12-02 01:30:45.000000000 +0000
                    191: +++ /tmp/cvsps.py       2010-01-20 12:52:11.000000000 +0000
                    192: @@ -271,14 +271,14 @@
                    193:                  tags[rev].append(match.group(1))
                    194:                  branchmap[match.group(1)] = match.group(2)
                    195:  
                    196: -            elif re_31.match(line):
                    197: +            elif re_31.match(line) and re_50.match(peek):
                    198:                  state = 5
                    199:              elif re_32.match(line):
                    200:                  state = 0
                    201:  
                    202:          elif state == 4:
                    203:              # expecting '------' separator before first revision
                    204: -            if re_31.match(line):
                    205: +            if re_31.match(line) and re_50.match(peek):
                    206:                  state = 5
                    207:              else:
                    208:                  assert not re_32.match(line), _('must have at least '
                    209: @@ -357,7 +357,7 @@
                    210:  
                    211:          elif state == 8:
                    212:              # store commit log message
                    213: -            if re_31.match(line):
                    214: +            if re_31.match(line) and re_50.match(peek):
                    215:                  state = 5
                    216:                  store = True
                    217:              elif re_32.match(line):
                    218: </pre>
                    219: helps it to cope with the output of cvs rlog -N -r1.66 pkgsrc/databases/rrdtool/Makefile (that's the easy one)
                    220: but then it tries to parse the output of (eg) cvs rlog -N -r1.19 pkgsrc/graphics/dcraw/Makefile and it's not clear
                    221: to me how it could hope to get that one right just from cvs rlog, and all alternatives are going to be rather tedious
1.7       wiki      222: and I'm still not planning to learn Python this week. If you feel more energetic, feel free to hand over patches.

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