Re: Grabbing XFree86.org's xc/ tree using cvsup

[David Fraser <davidf at sjsoft dot com>]

Mike A. Harris wrote:

> On Mon, 3 Nov 2003, David Fraser wrote:
>
>  
>
> > > > My suggestion is to import the current "stable" release into our CVS. 
> > > > With
> > > > CVS we can later import the next release and merge all patches we have
> > > > already commited. Fixing severe bugs is still an issue and might be 
> > > > solved
> > > > by regulary importing the snapshots of the "stable" branch and by 
> > > > monitoring
> > > > the XFree-commit list (I still read every posting on this list and would
> > > > just pay more attention to security fixes)
> > > >        
> > > Mike Harris had a good point that we should grab XFree86's CVS tree 
> > > with cvsup and use a perl script to change the root for all of the 
> > > files. Then we have both the current version of all files *and* the 
> > > history of all of those files.
> > >      
> > Note that this requires cvsupd to run on the server side ... do XFree86 
> > already run cvsupd?
> >    
>
> Yes.  XFree86.org has offered a cvsup access method for many 
> years.  I've been using cvsup to mirror the XFree86 repository 
> for about 2.5 years now.  It works great.  The initial mirroring 
> usually takes about 1.5 hours on my 300/125 (up/down) connection, 
> and after that, daily updates via cron at 5am take about 2 
> minutes on average.
>
>  
>
> > If not, you may find it easier to ask them for a tarball of the
> > CVSROOT to get going, and then something like cvsps (suggested
> > by Mike below) to keep up to date.
> >    
>
> I can make a tarball of the repository and upload it to 
> freedesktop.org if someone would prefer.  Really though it'd be 
> nice for us to just have a cvsps mirror on fd.o sync'd nightly 
> for everyone to use.  That could be tarballed easily after 
> mirroring is complete and copied into a new home for further 
> development.
>
>
>  
>
> > > He suggested using cvsps to generate patch sets. He also suggested 
> > > doing our development on a branch, keeping HEAD more or less in sync 
> > > with XFree86.org CVS HEAD, and merge HEAD to our branch whenever 
> > > required (to get bug fixes, etc.).
> > >
> > >      
> > >
> > > > I doubt that a complete mirror of the XFree86 CVS is a good solution 
> > > > since
> > > > there is no way (at least I konw of none) to automaticly track 
> > > > changes in
> > > > the XFree86 repository and commit them to ours too. So importing the 
> > > > whole
> > > > repository is in my opinion a waste of space since we'd have to 
> > > > import all
> > > > old revisions from the XFree repository too.
> > > >        
> > > I think Mike had a good point that it would be wise to have the 
> > > history of each file in the tree... what do you think?
> > >      
> > I think this would be great ; it also allows the possibility of 
> > producing security-patched versions of older versions of XFree86, and 
> > the version history also provides a kind of documentation of the source
> >    
>
> Yep.  It also allows people to branch XFree86 releases anywhere
> in the past also, so one could theoretically maintain
> 4.1.0/4.2.1/4.3.0 beyond the timeframe XFree86.org would be
> willing to do so.  I've thought of doing that before, but I 
> figured unless I was going to spend time doing enough work on the 
> tree and backporting some things that it wouldn't be worth the 
> effort.  As time goes on and I have to support 4.1.0 for a 
> billion years due to long term support of our OS products, I 
> might change my mind and use CVS.  ;o)
>
>
>  
Mike,
Thanks for the reply. That clarifies everything.
David
(CCing this to the cygwin-xfree mailing list so everyone else can see 
the message too...)