[Savannah-dev] New CVS structure makes merging quite difficult

[Derek FEICHTINGER]

Hi,

we are beginning now the merging of the CERN Savannah version (which we 
synchronized in January for the last time with the GNU site).

We are facing the same problem which Marcus Hardt from the FZK 
(http://gridportal.fzk.de) has already mentioned.

> > For us at FZK I foresee some trouble, since you seem to have changed the
> > directory structure.

The CVS directory structure of GNU Savannah was severly changed by directly 
moving files inside the repository. This poses heavy problems, since it makes 
it impossible for anybody to obtain an older working version of Savannah from 
the CVS. Although it was surely a good idea to improve the directory 
organization, it would maybe have been better to just start a new CVS module 
for this big migration and leave the old one online (the fault in the end 
lies in part in the nature of CVS which is not capable to version the 
directory structures. The pure CVS way of deleting and adding the file with a 
new name is not very convenient and one loses the file history).

We noticed that even the changelog files have been affected. All old pathnames 
in the changelogs (even in old entries) have been query/replaced with the new 
filenames.
Some files don't exist any more or their names have been changed. This makes 
the merge a highly nontrivial procedure.   

The only procedure which seems to make the merge possible seems to me:

1. Organize one's own version of Savannah to match the new GNU Savannah 
structure.
2. Get this version to work (i.e. correcting all link paths)
3. Use the CVS merge command and get that version to work.

It would be very nice, if there was a list mapping the old pathnames to the 
new pathnames, because it's not only trivial changes like /savannah/www -> 
/savannah/frontend/php. Does such a list exist for the time when the changes 
were made?
If not, we will have to go the hard way and build it ourselves (we've started 
building a script which automatizes the mapping as far as possible). We will 
make the list available for the other Savannah sites which would like to move 
to the new structure.

Cheers,
Derek


-- 
Dr. Derek Feichtinger                   Tel:   +41 22 767 26 98
LCG/SPI Group                           email: address@hidden
CERN                                    http://people.web.psi.ch/feichtinger
CH-1211 Genève 23