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Annotation of wikisrc/projects/project/cvs-migration.mdwn, revision 1.12

1.1       mspo        1: [[!template id=project
                      2: 
                      3: title="CVS Migration for NetBSD repos"
                      4: 
                      5: contact="""
                      6: [tech-repository](mailto:tech-repository@netbsd.org)
                      7: """
                      8: 
                      9: category="misc"
                     10: difficulty="hard"
                     11: 
                     12: description="""
1.8       wiki       13: 
                     14: ###background and description
                     15: NetBSD is one of the first projects to use internet-available source control.
                     16: It has been using CVS since the very beginning of the project (over 21 years)
                     17: and the repository is vast.
                     18: 
                     19: NetBSD also hosts the pkgsrc repository which has many small files, many
                     20: "imports" and other technical challenges associated with VCS.
                     21: 
                     22: NetBSD also has various small internal repositories (like this wiki).
                     23: 
1.9       wiki       24: During the last twenty years tooling has improved and popular developer culture
1.8       wiki       25: has shifted to new workflows.
                     26: 
                     27: The purpose of this project is to identify:
                     28: 
                     29:  * existing 'workflows' in common use among developers
                     30:     * (example): [[dholland/hgnb]]
                     31:  * existing 'tooling' within NetBSD the organization
                     32:     * how much memory/disk is required to host NetBSD?
                     33:     * how are backups performed?
                     34:     * can the tools be cross-build?
                     35:  * security requirements like
                     36:     * how do we validate commits?
                     37:     * how do we ensure commits originated from developers?
                     38:  * release engineering requirements such as
                     39:     * how does a pullup request work?
                     40:     * how do we ensure the correct files are included in the correct release branches?
                     41:     * how do we checkout a release branch
                     42:     * how do we look at the history of a release branch
                     43:     * how do we get different revisions of a file on a branch
                     44: 
                     45: major parts of the technical work like "how to convert FROM CVS to git/hg/fossil"
                     46: has already been done, which is why we are able to now ask "how would the project
                     47: continue to function?"
                     48: 
                     49: 
                     50: ### Our decision matters
1.7       schmonz    51: 
                     52: You're reading this because you care about the future of NetBSD and
                     53: you understand that good tools act as a force multiplier.
                     54: 
1.8       wiki       55: ### Our decision is not obvious
1.7       schmonz    56: 
                     57: If it were, we'd have made it already (and wouldn't be disagreeing
                     58: so persistently about which one it needs to be ;-).
                     59: 
1.8       wiki       60: ### Our decision needs to be about the whole elephant
1.7       schmonz    61: 
                     62: We all understand the basics of using source control. This level
                     63: of understanding is necessary but not sufficient to make an informed
                     64: decision about whether to migrate any or all of NetBSD's repositories
                     65: to another VCS, and if so which, or how.
                     66: 
                     67: Our choice of VCS carries implications not only about how developers
                     68: hack on NetBSD, but also about how non-developers contribute and
                     69: become developers, and how Project sysadmins keep our valuable code
                     70: secure. Therefore, any choice of VCS other than the default (sticking
                     71: with CVS for a while longer) necessarily implies that as a group,
                     72: we all need to learn how we're going to do what we expect to need
                     73: to do. Not all of this learning needs to happen before we can make
                     74: a reasonably confident decision for our Project. But if we want to
                     75: arrive at consensus, much of it does.
                     76: 
                     77: There is no available choice of VCS that entirely avoids tradeoffs
                     78: for us. Therefore, to choose intelligently, we must first consider
                     79: all the tradeoffs we can think of, then decide which ones we can
1.10      jnemeth    80: live with and which we can not.
1.7       schmonz    81: 
1.8       wiki       82: ### Our decision needs to be made together
1.7       schmonz    83: 
                     84: We're a community. The only way a complicated, interconnected set
                     85: of changes like this can be implemented is for us to arrive at rough
                     86: consensus that some particular VCS:
                     87: 
                     88: - is sufficiently well suited to our project's needs in theory,
                     89: - is sufficiently easily adapted to our needs in practice,
                     90: - has a sufficiently fail-safe migration plan,
                     91: - is worth the effort to switch, and
                     92: - has volunteers to do the work.
                     93: 
1.8       wiki       94: ### How you can help, right now
1.7       schmonz    95: 
                     96: What are some considerations you think are important? Are they
                     97: listed here? If not, edit this page and add them.
                     98: 
1.8       wiki       99: ### Considerations
1.7       schmonz   100: 
1.8       wiki      101: Humans
1.7       schmonz   102: 
1.8       wiki      103: * People who administer Project resources
1.10      jnemeth   104: * People who administer release branches
1.11      schmonz   105: * People who administer security updates
1.8       wiki      106: * People who can commit directly to NetBSD
                    107: * People who can't commit directly to NetBSD
1.7       schmonz   108: 
1.12    ! wiki      109: Machines
        !           110: 
        !           111: * Some ports/machines are memory constraint or rather slow (by todays standards), a VCS different than CVS should be able to used on these machines as well.
        !           112:  (e.g. git has parameters to tune memory usage, and there exists git-cvsserver which allows a git repository to be accessed using a CVS client)
1.1       mspo      113: 
                    114: 
                    115: """
                    116: ]]