[M3devel] "fork"

[Olaf Wagner]

On Sat, 20 Apr 2013 12:52:58 +0200
Dragiša Durić <dragisha at m3w.org> wrote:

> We have this situation where Elego does not have neither interest nor resources to spare to do version control system migration. Projects like GCC and GNOME have abandoned CVS for good, and they are only  two on a very long list.
> 
> My idea is basically to do this migration/fork without actually doing one.  In short:
>   * We convert existing CVS to SVN, make CVS repository "read-only" i.e. single writer.
>   * Do all our work on SVN,
>   * Use svn2cvs  to save SVN commits back to our "read-only" CVS repo.
> 
> This way we get the best of both worlds. We have up-to-date CVS so all of our current infrastructure simply works. Process outlined  is based on well-tested tools so we have little to no worries there. And we have as modern version control system as we can have without a distributed one.
> 
> My first choice is  SVN as a target because of easy way to maintain  mirrored CVS repo, and thus reuse existing infrastructure. 
> 
> We can also use GIT in one of two scenarios:
>  * Go straight from CVS to GIT, never look back;
>  * add svn2git step to first "recipe" and use  git2svn to sync back to svn repository from first step. 
> 
> This second variant looks like an overkill, but there are tools to maintain bidirectional mirroring of single git branch to a svn repo (esp. if this mirroring tools is only writer to svn repo). And all this is needed only in case we need (and I suppose we do) to maintain live CVS.
> 
> I believe Elego will have no problems to extend their already great contribution to Modula-3 with few gigabytes of disk space and few configured processes. I would happily contribute my time and expertise to help with additional workload, and I am sure I am not only one willing to help. 

Indeed svn would be the easier way to go, but I'm not sure that is what
most of the developers now want.

In contrast to what I said two or three years ago, I now think that
a migration away from CVS is overdue, but I haven't had the time to do it
right and probably won't have that time in the near future. We _do_ have
several svn and git experts in our company, but I haven't been able
to inspire them to do the migration yet.

Actually I think that the migration itself will be not very difficult; it is
the Hudson/Jenkins/Apache/scripts support that will mostly need to be
rewritten wrt. version control. I doubt that anybody outside of Elego has
done much work on that.

I'd like to try to acquire some internal ressources again; so I'd ask
you to wait for some weeks. If I haven't been able to organize something
until June, I'd think it will be best if someone else takes over completely.

Olaf
-- 
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