FreeRADIUS CVS->{BZR,Hg} migration consideration

[Paul TBBle Hampson]

On Tue, Sep 13, 2005 at 01:48:10PM -0500, Chris Parker wrote:
> On Sep 13, 2005, at 1:28 PM, Paul TBBle Hampson wrote:

> >In order to have a look at how something like Bazaar-ng (which  seems to have
> >come out on top after consideration for my significantly smaller  projects) or
> >Mercuirial (which is optimised towards larger projects, and might suit
> >FreeRADIUS nicely) will handle the importing of current the  FreeRADIUS CVS
> >repository, I propose to run a read-only parallel repository in  either or both
> >of the above on my own server, syncing against the FreeRADIUS CVS  server.
> >I'm planning to use tailor [1] to do the initial conversion and  regular pulls.
> >I'd then offer rsync, http and *web access as appropriate (although  I've never
> >tried it for Mercurial and only just set it up for bazaar-ng) for  the curious
> >to see what sort of difference it makes.
> >However, the initial pull will produce pain for cvs.freeradius.org  I expect, so
> >I'd like to know if there's a particular time window which would be  better for
> >the cvs.freeradius.org box to be hammered upon by me doing this.  (And be sure
> >the time window is in UTC. I'm in Australia, so I don't want a TZ  mistake to
> >cause me to bring something grinding to a halt in front of  someone's CEO. ^_^)

> Let's say 3-5am Central US time ( GMT - 5 ).

> How much of a 'pain' are you talking about here?

A hammering on pserver as I pull not just history, but do it multiple
times to get the system up to date as well as work out how best to use
Tailor.

Ideally and eventually, I'd want to pull the entire FreeRADIUS history,
which just screams "pain" to me. (The pull, not FreeRADIUS's history.
^_^)

And once I've gotten this sort of thing going, then I have a local
repository I can autobuild FreeRADIUS against regularly, without
generating extra pain in traffic. (A bonus feature! Hooray!)

> Can you clarify exactly what you need to do?  It is possible for me  to send you a
> tarball of the cvs repository, which might make it easier than trying  to bludgeon
> the cvs server.  :)

If you're willing to do that, it would be much easier, and I suspect
better. I could also practice with Tailor on a faster machine than my
web server. ^_^

> >I'm also open to other suggestions of versioning software to use,  although I'm
> >really only familiar with CVS in usage, and have been reading about  git and bzr
> >recently.

> We've actually started playing with SVN internally here at my work.   That and
> CVS are what I've had experience with.  Not that heavy into branching/ etc. so
> I can't comment on that aspect of SVN in relation to CVS.

The main reason I've rejected Subversion so far (despite having actually
been leaning towards it twelve months ago, last time I raised this) is
that it's not distributed. It basically fails to meet my usecase, of not
polluting upstream with Debian-specific detail like not llinking
OpenSSL.

I also think it doesn't solve the problem that I keep three or four
copies of FreeRADIUS checked out locally (head + patches to break
various things, a clean copy of head, release_1_0 are permanent
residents at the moment. A Debian branch would make four) and they all
hammer upon the upstream server. If I maintain a local branch of the
remote repository, I can then branch off _that_ meaning I only need to
update against the remote branch once each.

And a brief consideration of svk (which appears to be distributed svn?)
scared me right off.

I must say SVN is a good migration path for a centralised system, and I
can't say that FreeRADIUS has worked _poorly_ with a centralised model.
Hence my trialling of several repositories.

I'll add Monotone to my list of programs to try, at Alan's suggestion. I
will also add SVN, but that might take more time to set up access to, as
I believe it needs its own modules to serve. (Then again, so might
Monotone and Mercurial. ^_^)

I have to say one of the tasty tasty things about bazaar-ng over CVS (or
SVN?) is the repository all likes in a .bzr directory in the head, so an
export is simply a tarball ignoring that directory.

I have a suspicion this makes pulling a sub-part of a respository more
painful if not impossible, mind you. And the relative youth of bazaar-ng
is an issue right now, although Canonical are driving its development
with actual money, as they want to move to it ASAP. However, the on-disk
format is being replaced with the final release format for the next
release. So it's a little in flux. ^_^

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------
Paul "TBBle" Hampson, MCSE
8th year CompSci/Asian Studies student, ANU
The Boss, Bubblesworth Pty Ltd (ABN: 51 095 284 361)
Paul.Hampson at Pobox.Com

Of course Pacman didn't influence us as kids. If it did,
we'd be running around in darkened rooms, popping pills and
listening to repetitive music.
 -- Kristian Wilson, Nintendo, Inc, 1989

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.1/au/
-----------------------------------------------------------
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.freeradius.org/pipermail/freeradius-devel/attachments/20050914/56ecfff9/attachment.pgp>