Problem reports for version control systems

[Lloyd Parkes <lloyd%must-have-coffee.gen.nz@localhost>]

Hi all,
The problem reports people have in their emails are completely 
inadequate for trying to determine what is going wrong for people trying 
to access the NetBSD source.

Since I was the first person to post an inadequate report in this first 
batch, I'll go first at trying to do better. There are three sections to 
this email. First, a description of the host and network I am running 
this on. Second, a description of what I did, what I got, and what I 
expected to get. Third, I'll speculate on possible causes.

Host and Network
================

I am in New Zealand, which tends to have good internet access to the 
home and Long Fat Networks (LFNs) to the rest of the world.

The host is a Xeon E3-1241 v3 @ 3.50GHz with eight hyperthreads and 32GB 
RAM. It has a 128GB SSD for / and 4x4TB disks in a raidz zpool on /vol. 
All work is being done on /vol. The OS is NetBSD 9.99.79.

The network is a 1Gb/s LAN through to a smaller NetBSD router running 
NPF with MSS clamping enabled so that I can get Netflix. My ISP does not 
use CGN for my IPv4 connection. My IPv6 connection is tunnelled through 
to Hurricane Electric in Sydney, Australia.

    ceph4% cvs -v

    Concurrent Versions System (CVS) 1.12.13 (client/server)
    with CVSACL Patch 1.2.5 (cvsacl.sourceforge.net)

    ceph4% hg --version
    Mercurial Distributed SCM (version 5.3.2)

What I Did, Got, and Expected
=============================

In all cases, I pretty much copied instructions from the NetBSD web site.

    ceph4% cd /vol/src/cylc/src-CVS
    ceph4% export CVSROOT="anoncvs%anoncvs.NetBSD.org@localhost:/cvsroot"
    ceph4% export CVS_RSH="ssh"
    ceph4% cvs checkout -A -P src
    cvs checkout: Updating src
    U src/BUILDING
    U src/Makefile
    U src/Makefile.inc
    U src/README.md
    ...
    U src/crypto/external/bsd/heimdal/dist/lib/wind/test-utf8.c
    [very long pause here]
    client_loop: send disconnect: Broken pipe
    cvs [checkout aborted]: end of file from server (consult above 
messages if any)

I expected the output to not pause too much and for the listing to run 
through to the end of src/usr.sbin without disconnecting and aborting.

    ceph4% hg clone -U https://anonhg.NetBSD.org/src src-hg
    [lots of progress stuff gets displayed here]
    applying clone bundle from 
https://cdn.NetBSD.org/_bundles/src/77d2a2ece3a06d837da45acd0fda80086ab4113c.zstd.hg 

    adding changesets
    adding manifests
    adding file changes
    added 931876 changesets with 2425841 changes to 439702 files (+417 
heads)
    finished applying clone bundle
    searching for changes
    adding changesets
    adding manifests
    adding file changes
    adding changesets
    adding manifests
    adding file changes
    added 22612 changesets with 161374 changes to 110024 files (+6 heads)
    new changesets 26c8f37631b6:6f32acf2c5e1 (230 drafts)
    280602 local changesets published

This is what I expected.

Speculation
===========

I'm suspicious of the long pause in the CVS example. Maybe one end or 
the other of the CVS connection spent too long doing disk I/O or 
calculating stuff and then NPF timed-out the connection?

Cheers,
Lloyd