[Gnu-arch-users] Re: gnuarch.org

[Miles Bader]

address@hidden (Ludovic Courtès) writes:
> Option (1) requires a tool like `cscvs' and I suspect that this is not
> trivial to achieve (I've never tried it, though).  Also, it's maybe not
> very useful since you could as well access the history of your project
> using CVS anyway.

Something like cscvs tries to detect "logical changesets" in the CVS
repository, and commit each one to arch as a separate arch revision; if
it works, it is a nice thing, but because it depends on heuristics (CVS
simply doesn't keep enough information to do it properly) it won't work
well unless your CVS repository follows certain conventions.

In particular, I think cscvs uses comparison of log entries and dates so
that commits done with "cvs commit -mMSG lots of files..." will be
detectable as a single "changeset" (because they all have an identical
log msg and a very close commit date).  Projects where everybody commits
each file separately with different log messages (like emacs :-( ) are
pretty much hopeless.

In cases where cscvs _doesn't_ work well, I'm not sure the resulting
arch repository (which would end up with something like each change to
each file having its own arch revision) would be very usable...  Maybe
it's better and simpler to just check in each real release /
daily-snapshot / whatever as an arch revision, and call that close
enough (if you don't do daily snapshots, you could just iterate though the
CVS repository and check out a snapshot at 4am of every date...).

-Miles

-- 
Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra.  Suddenly it flips over,
pinning you underneath.  At night the ice weasels come.  --Nietzsche