Re: [boost] Re: Checking out latest Boost lock problem

From: Jeff Garland (jeff_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-01-31 07:53:20

On Sun, 30 Jan 2005 23:33:45 -0500, David Abrahams wrote
> "Jeff Garland" <jeff_at_[hidden]> writes:
> 
> > On Sun, 30 Jan 2005 12:15:18 -0500, Edward Diener wrote
> >> troy d. straszheim wrote:
> >> 
> >> I am all for Subversion also, since I have used it successfully in
> >> professional work and am doing so now. It is irritating that one is 
> >> not able to get the latest Boost because of these lock problems. 
> >> However that may not be a CVS versus Subversion issue. No doubt a 
> >> CVS expert will tell me whether it is or not.
> 
> Yes, we have run to the edge of CVS's capabilities.  How long does it
> take you to update?

Honestly, I don't know -- I don't update that frequently (maybe every few
weeks) so updates aren't a big deal for me.  I'm not going to speak out
against converting -- I recognize the limits of CVS and understand that others
may be constrained by them now.  My only caution is that we need to be
methodical and ensure that boost development isn't ground to a halt --
everyone is going to have to invest time to make any conversion happen.

> > Subversion isn't a realistic choice at the moment unless we are
> > going to move away from sourceforge for repository hosting.
> 
> Actually the moderators have been discussing doing just that.  OSL is
> going to provide us with SVN support.  The mods just agreed that I
> would announce the idea here so people can get used to it, and so we
> can make the move when the resources become available (about a month
> away).

I assume OSL is the Open Systems Lab at Indiana Univ.

> OSL will administer the hardware; they have several projects using
> Subversion at OSL, at least one of which is comparable in size to
> Boost.  Hopefully their sysadmins will grant the boost moderators 
> full admin privileges over the SVN repository.  Doug Gregor (who is 
> at OSL) says:
> 
>   "I think we can do this. Subversion doesn't seem to have quite as 
> many    issues as CVS, so we shouldn't need help as often, but the 
> sysadmins    will be responsive and there are several Boosters on-site."

I have my doubts that they are comparible in size w.r.t number of users.  Are
these internal projects or external projects?  Please don't take this next
statement wrong -- I appreciate greatly the contribution of OSL folks
and resources -- just trying to make sure before we jump off of something that
is basically working from my view.  Since we moved the mailing lists there
have been issues that never got resolved -- specifically, the archive seems to
lose messages or get stuck and posts take up to 30 minutes to be processed and
reflected back. That was a clear step down from Yahoo groups which was
basically immediate response and never lost a message.  Again, I'm not
complaining or blaming -- I suspect that the admins at OSL are just dealing
with buggy / non-performant mailing list software.  But the question is, how
can we ensure we don't have a similar service degredation issues with a
conversion to subversion? We can survive the issues with the mailing list
easier than we can the repository -- although both of the mailing list
problems are reasonably serious.

> > * Should we move boost-sandbox first to gain experience?
> 
> Interesting idea.

I think we should use the actual boost source tree.  The sandbox doesn't have
the same scale or activity.  I'm not sure how to really test it short of
people actually developing against it and then somehow taking finished results
back to CVS during the transition.  

Maybe we need to have a coordinated test where we all agree to pull down the
whole repository at a certain time -- just to make sure the
machines/network/software is really up to the task?  Maybe there are other
tests we should do before jumping ship?

One last question, how much of our version history will we lose?  Will be
still be able to pull the 1.32 branch out of subversion or will we have to go
back to the legacy repository to see this?  There are tools for conversion,
but there are lots of options.  Someone will need to take a long look at this,
but if we convert I'd like to see us convert for good and not lose history in
the process.  See http://cvs2svn.tigris.org/cvs2svn.html for more.

Jeff

ps: The lock is still stuck -- I was running an update test and got the
problem....