[GRASS-dev] Re: [GRASS-PSC] GRASS 7 Migration from CVS to SVN

[Paul Kelly]

Hello Martin

On Tue, 25 Sep 2007, Martin Landa wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I'm surprised there isn't bigger discussion about this. The migration
> is crucial for the future development of GRASS. It seems that CVS->SVN
> is not bigger problem for the community.

I think it's an important and relatively urgent issue too. Indeed I would 
be trying to push ahead and help resolve some of the technicalities of the 
move if only I wasn't so busy with non-GRASS work at the present time.

I will say I was concerned at the idea of only moving the CVS HEAD to the 
new repository and leaving the other repositories to stagnate on the 
Intevation server. As I said I think it is unreasonable to expect 
Intevation to continue to support the CVS server if we are only keeping a 
few old not-much-used repositories there. IOW, I don't think the proposal 
of only moving the CVS HEAD to the OSGeo SVN server is feasible. We should 
move everything.

Although, we don't have to move it all at once. Perhaps we could copy the 
CVS head into a new repository and use it as the basis of GRASS 7. We 
could release 6.3/6.4 from the current CVS server (while concurrently 
starting development on 7.x) and move the grass6 and old grass (we could 
rename it grass5) repositories and so on at a later (but not too late) 
stage. I would like to hope disk space at OSGeo won't be a problem?

Markus indicated there were some problems with the cvs2svn conversion of 
the existing repository and I would like to help resolve these before we 
move, if only I could get some time. Will try my best but I'm travelling 
at the minute and don't have access to my usual machine. Markus said rsync 
was available on intevation.de, so we can take an rsync copy of the entire 
CVS repository and work from there, i.e. we don't require extra support 
from Intevation, only from the OSGeo System Administration committee, to 
make the move. That's good. ISTR from the wiki page one specific problem 
where a file had been deleted at some stage and then re-created in CVS, 
with the result that CVS had two copies of the file - one in the Attic and 
one in the working directory, and cvs2svn couldn't handle that situation. 
It was suggested on the wiki to simply delete the older version of the 
file and then only import the newer one, i.e. losing the "ancient" history 
- that's an example of an issue I feel we should resolve (perhaps by 
manually merging the Attic and current files before running cvs2svn) 
before doing the "big move". (I might have misunderstood this particular 
situation though---I only was able to skim briefly over the issues a few 
weeks ago).

> I am not quite sure about OSGeo, the future, etc. People Intevation.de
> were offering stable support for many year (big thanks!). BTW, is
> there anyone from Intevation.de who is following this discussion?

Have I understood correctly that we don't need sysadmin support from 
Intevation to do the move? I guess it's OK then although it would be nice 
to have a comment.

So in summary, just wanted to say that I support the move and if I had 
time would even write up a PSC proposal for it. Just a little bit busy.

Paul