Does / Is anyone maintaining CVS for FreeBSD?

[Peter Wemm]

On Mon, Dec 31, 2012 at 2:39 PM, Chris H <chris#@1command.com> wrote:
>> On 31 December 2012 15:40, Chris H <chris#@1command.com> wrote:
>>> Are there _any_ CVS servers/trunks/tree's left? If so, how _current_ are
>>> they?
>>
>> Ports and Source currently have CVS trees.
>> Ports has an explicit EoL on February 28th (2 months from today)
>> Source does not have an explicit EoL though it *is* considered deprecated.
>
> Thank you for providing this information, and my apologies, for not having
> better researched it myself. I'll make an effort to provide a permanent CVS
> repo for both src && ports.

At the risk of a late reply stirring things up.

doc and www were converted from cvs -> svn in May 2012.  There was
*never* a svn->cvs exporter for the doc/www trees - it was a clean
break and switch over, and the cvs tree was closed.  However, a stale
orphaned copy of the doc/www files were in the cvsup network.  If you
were using those, you were using stale, out of date files.

I've been rebuilding *.freebsd.org machines over the last 3-4 months
and came across these stale files on a machine that was being
decommissioned.  When I was building the replacement I didn't include
them.

The cvs exporter was running on a machine that was broken into.  The
entire machine, code, exporters and cvs repository were considered
tainted.  As the exported src cvs tree has been deprecated for years,
we should have just turned it off, Instead we salvaged and reviewed
what we could, threw together a really quick and dirty exporter
replacement and made it run for a little longer.   It really is on its
last legs.  Note that there is no practical way to audit a cvs tree
after an incident like that, especially a deprecated tree at that.

cvs for /usr/src was deprecated in October 2008.  The original plan
for running the exporter for 2-3 months as a transition aide ran a
little longer than planned.

The branch support timeline is listed here: http://www.freebsd.org/security/

As things stand right now, this is the exporter's run schedule:
* RELENG_6:  Updates once a day, probably turning off on Feb 28th.
* RELENG_7:  Updates hourly, probably turning off on Feb 28th at EOL
* RELENG_7_4: Updates hourly, probably turning off on Feb 28th at EOL
* RELENG_8:  Updates hourly
* RELENG_8_3: Updates hourly
* RELENG_9: Updates hourly
* RELENG_9_0: Updates hourly
* src-HEAD: Updates daily, probably turning off on Feb 28th.
* ports-HEAD: Updates hourly, definitely turning off on Feb 28th.

That's about what the limit of what the machine can handle.  When
folks go on a commit spree, the poor thing runs its disks white-hot
for a few hours to catch up.


No new branches will ever make it into cvs.  eg: no RELENG_9_2.
You'll have to get them from svn, just like getting updates to the
older branches.

Its also worth noting that all of the RELENG_9 series were released
from the subversion tree - cvs was never involved.  If there's an 8.4,
it'll have to be built from svn as well.

We have some significant problems with both ezm3 and cvsup itself
(which is written in Modula-3).  It basically is an inverse
compatability binary..  The runtime code uses the oldest available
versions of syscalls that it can, mostly the FreeBSD-4 versions.
Emulation for some of the more exotic functionality - particularly
signals - has become ... problematic .. lately.  It has memory
corruption problems.  The cvsup/cvsupd servers break regularly when
they corrupt their checkouts files and fetch the same data over and
over and over again, crashing each time.

And worse.. cvsup/cvsupd doesn't understand the version of cvs we have
in the freebsd tree.  *Every* *single* *commit* causes a checksum
error and re-fetch.  For the cvs/rcs ,v files, it degenerates into the
old sup(1) mode - not even rsync.

It is more efficient to transport the src cvs repository with rsync +
rsyncd these days than cvsup/cvsupd.

I'm sorry, but it is time to move on.
-- 
Peter Wemm - peter at wemm.org; peter at FreeBSD.org; peter at yahoo-inc.com; KI6FJV
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