[swarm-hackers] swarm SVN

[Scott Christley]

Greetings,

Well there certainly are a number of interesting version control  
systems out there, git and mercurial have an interesting distributed  
philosophy, I especially like how you can commit your changes  
locally.  What I don't quite exactly grok is how releases would work,  
does somebody have to own the "release" repository?  Or maybe we setup  
some common repository which is used for this purpose?  This is  
obviously handled in some way because the Linux kernel is using it.

Anyways, it seems the consensus is that SVN would be a good  
improvement, we can go this step pretty easy.  I tried out the  
conversion process, essentially used rsync to get a local copy of the  
CVS repository, then ran cvs2svn converter script.  The script had an  
issue with just a few files, all ones sitting in Attic.  For one file,  
it appears the metadata was corrupt, for the other files, they existed  
in both the repository as well as the Attic, which shouldn't happen.   
I pretty much just deleted those Attic files and the conversion went  
smoothly, only took about 10 minutes.

I've put a copy of the converted SVN repository up on the my web site,  
you can download and check it out to see how it looks.

http://silver.ics.uci.edu/~schristl/projects/swarm/swarm-svn.tgz

Create a temporary directory and unarchive into it, then you can  
checkout the whole repository.

svn co file://path_to_repository

Note that even though the repository is only about 100M, the complete  
checkout will be almost 1G because of all the branches and tags.   
Also, some tags have the same name, but only different in case, so the  
checkout will get an error on case-insensitive file systems such as  
Mac OSX, we can easily fix this by renaming those tags.

If we decide to do the conversion, we should wait and give everybody a  
chance to commit any changes they have to get a final CVS, then  
convert and request Savannah to install it.  Not sure how long it will  
take Savannah to do that.

cheers
Scott