Conversion to SVN

[Gavin Atkinson]

On Fri, 7 Oct 2011, Doug Barton wrote:

> On 10/07/2011 14:15, Gavin Atkinson wrote:
> > On Fri, 7 Oct 2011, Rene Ladan wrote:
> >> Op 07-10-2011 16:13, Ulrich Sp?rlein schreef:
> >>> it looks like I'm not the only one thinking about moving the doc/www
> >>> repos from CVS to SVN, and other people actually have not only thought
> >>> about it but already played around with conversions.
> >>>
> >>> gavin did some preliminary conversions and it turns out that we end up
> >>> with ~50k revisions and about 650MB of changes (IIRC). There are also
> >>> lots of weird branches, so perhaps we could size that down a bit.
> >>>
> >>> What I, personally, would like to see is us using the same svn repo as
> >>> src. That means we would have to stop svn.freebsd.org for the
> >>> conversion, turn off email sending, dump 50k revisions into it (under
> >>> /doc and /www perhaps? where should branches/tags end up?), then turn
> >>> everything back on.
> > 
> > The more I think about this, the less I like the idea.  I really don't 
> > like the idea of having revision numbers which no longer increase with 
> > commit date (i.e. having revisions 1-250,000 correspond to the existing 
> > src tree, 250,000-300,000 being the imported doc tree, and then the 
> > combined repo being 300,001 onwards).
> 
> I'm sorry, I don't understand your concern here. The commit ids
> increment monotonically in svn, and the number is global to the whole
> repo. Given that the individual files won't be increasing to a
> deterministic value, I don't understand why we care what the actual
> number is.

I don't like the idea that r226166 can be a change from 10 minutes ago, 
and r226167 would be a change from 1994.

> I'm still not sure I understand this, sorry. :)
> 
> > Combining doc and www more closely, however, I do see the benefit of.  
> > However, currently we don't (and have no need to) branch the www tree with 
> > each release.  If we combine them, we would be - even though we probably 
> > don't wish to.
> 
> I think we should give more thought to the structure. I'd like to see
> one doc/ directory, with what's in doc and www now both. But we may need
> to think harder about what parts we may want to branch, and what parts
> we don't.

Given that moving directories is a cheap process in SVN, I'm tending 
towards feeling that rearranging the repo can be done after the 
conversion, and not necessarily during.

> > It may actually be easier, as all the infrastructure from the src repo can 
> > possibly be reused easily.  Combining them may be harder as more work 
> > would presumably need to be done on sorting out ACLs for src and doc 
> > committers, etc?
> 
> Effectively the administrative separation that we have now is on the
> honor system, and it's worked well ever since we branched the original
> CVS repository. I don't see any reason why that wouldn't continue to work.

Indeed, but we still maintain a nominal distinction between src, doc and 
ports committers, meaning that when somebody commits to a different 
repository this gets flagged in the commit message.  I'm working on the 
assumption that the distinction between different commit bits will remain.

Gavin