Re: Why I'm working on a NetBSD conversion

["Eric S. Raymond" <esr%thyrsus.com@localhost>]

S.P.Zeidler <spz%NetBSD.org@localhost>:
> NetBSD cvs uses the feature since afair sometime last year. It should
> make moving "anywhere else but with changesets" decidedly less urgent.

Oh?  There are some unhappy edge cases in repositories with a
transition from no commitids to commitids - it's unfortunate those
aren't eight years deep in the history rather than one.
 
> > There remains the question of what NetBSD's strategic direction is.  Do you
> > intend to remain with CVS for the central repositories?  If not, can I
> > assist the transition out of it?
> 
> I have only a 1/200th of a voice in that. Part of the problem is that
> cvs is an evil we all know and know how to work around, while an
> alternative VCS that is significantly better than cvs and doesn't give at
> least a third of the active developers an outbreak of hives has yet to be
> found. i.e., the problem is not so much "would we like to move to
> something that supports $wishlist?" but "which one would we move to?"

I understand the problem.  I can't solve the politics, but I have some
technical advice that may be helpful.

The effective demise of bzr simplifies matters. There are now only two
even remotely realistic choices going forward: git, and hg. Subversion 
is, practically speaking, out of the running - you'll find out why
if you benchmark checkouts on a history this size.

But that raises an interesting possibility.  Since late last year it has
been possible to present an hg view of a git repository. It would not
be very difficult, now, to move to a setup that presents to developers
as either git or hg depending on what client configuration they choose.

Do you think you could sell your gitophobic developers on a system that
does not lock them into using git, but allows hg? Obviously the anti-hg
people would be immediately satisfied.  Unless you have a large contingency
that gets hives from *both* systems, this might be a solution.

Another point: even if you're not politically ready for a transition in 
the base repos, I might be able to simultaneously make your mirroring
more effective and lay some groundwork for a later move.

You're now mirroring once a day?  I could give you the capability to
drop to a roughly 5-hour mirroring interval with a one-step process
using cvs-fast-export's incremental export facility.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>