Re: cvsup

["Simon 'corecode' Schubert" <corecode@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Vincent Stemen wrote:
> I was dismayed to discover that the BSD community (not just DragonFly)
> has created such as dependency on a tool written in an obscure
> problematic language such as Modula-3 that are not even easily ported to
> platforms such as DragonFly, causing us to have to run a binary from
> different platform after all this time.

Yes, not only you are upset about this.

> I found csup, a cvsup replacement written in C, only to discover it
> currently only supports what is called CVS mode, which means I cannot
> use it to download/update the repository.

Plus there is do csupd, so for running a cvsupd, you're still stuck with m3.

There is cvsync, however.  It only supports repo syncing (no checkout). 
But it is using a broken algorithm, which leads to RCS files being 
rearranged in a way that CVS can't use them (under certain conditions). 
The authors are aware of this (I told them), but didn't want to fix it.

> Is the repository available via rsync and, if not, I am curious as to
> why not?  Rsync is robust, popular, portable, and written in C.

Yes.  There are a couple of mirrors which serve the cvs repo via rsync. 
For instance use chlamydia.fs.ei.tum.de.  There are more, I guess.

> Also, has anybody considered writing some front end scripts to rsync to emulate
> the necessary features of cvsup?  I have found rsync to be very fast since it
> efficiently only transfers what has changed.  I also do not see any reason for
> the mirroring tool to need any knowledge of a specific repository type (e.g
> cvs, svn, etc).  You are just mirroring files.

Rsync is very slow when you tag a repo, because all the files change, but 
only one line.  It's not really optimized for this task.  But this doesn't 
happen very often, though.

cheers
  simon

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