csup vs cvs

[Lowell Gilbert]

doug at safeport.com writes:

> A change was MFC'd to the xorg intel driver to include support for the
> new chipsets. I took the fact that I could see the change on the web:
>
>   Date: Sun Apr  4 15:37:47 2010
>   New Revision: 206164
>   URL: http://svn.freebsd.org/changeset/base/206164

That's a subversion checkin.  The web source for what's in the cvs (and
therefore, shortly, cvsup) is cvsweb:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/

>   Log: MFC r205096, r205102
>         Add AGP support for Intel Pineview and Ironlake chipsets.
>
> to mean that it would be propogated out to my favored csup server in
> due course. The change was not on cvsup2.FreeBSD.org by 2AM Monday, so
> I got a source tree from a cvs repository my unix guru runs and
> updated using that. I used his because I host it.

Most likely, that tree is checked out via the cvsup protocol, which
means whatever server it came from had the update.  So some of them did,
even if cvsup2.freebsd.org didn't.  When the different servers differ,
you need to talk to the manager of a particular server to find out
what's happening on that one.

By comparing the subversion checkin time to the cvs checkin time, it
looks like the delay from subversion to cvs was negligable, so most
likely the delay is entirely due to cvsup2's update time.  I can't tell
how long that is, because I don't know what time zone your "2AM" is. 

> What I attempted to ask is (1) how are the mirrors updated; and (2),
> is there a particular lag time where the latest changes would have to
> be there? This is not normally an issue for me but I have a laptop
> that will not run X w/o this change.

The documentation project maintains a "hubs" article that covers the
"how" part.  The lag time mostly comes from the frequency with which the
mirrors update; official hubs are recommended to update hourly, but it's
not required.

Note that you could have gotten the change from either the svn URL you
posted, or from the cvs equivalent that I mentioned.  Then you could
have patched it onto your sources directly.  For a single-file change
(as the critical piece of this seems to be), that's the quick way to go.

> I normally do not use cvs because, I am not a developer and my
> learning new things bucket' is pretty full. Hence my [however badly
> worded] question. Again thanks for bearing with me.

cvs is not really *needed* for *anyone* on FreeBSD's base system these
days; the project uses it as a distribution method for the source code
tree, but real development is checked into subversion and (for official
branches) then automatically exported into the cvs tree.  The cvs tree
is distributed via the cvsup protocol to the hubs, and other mirrors can
pick it up from there.  The cvsup protocol (whether implemented in the
cvsup program or csup) is the main way these things are distributed, but
rsync, anonymous cvs, FTP, and probably other methods are supported
optionally (which means some mirrors offer them and others don't).

-- 
Lowell Gilbert, embedded/networking software engineer, Boston area
		http://be-well.ilk.org/~lowell/