Slashdot Mirror
Help ESR Stamp Out CVS and SVN In Our Lifetime
mtaht writes ESR is collecting specifications and donations towards getting a new high end machine to be used for massive CVS and SVN repository conversions, after encountering problems with converting the whole of netbsd over to git. What he's doing now sort of reminds me of holding a bake sale to build a bomber, but he's well on his way towards Xeon class or higher for the work. What else can be done to speed up adoption of git and preserve all the computer history kept in source code repositories? ESR says he'll match funds toward the purchase of the needed hardware, so if you want to help drive him into bankruptcy, now's your chance.
He isn't raising new money, he's opening up a discussion on what to do with the remaining money in some fund he started, and he said he'll match what's currently in the fund.
Wish we could talk the editors into doing basic fact checking on the article submissions they allow through.
VSS (Visual SourceSafe) was okay - as long as you locked it up behind a SourceOffSite (3rd party) server. The SOS service as the primary interface between the VSS repository and the clients prevented about 99% of corruption issues.
This was back when your options amounted to VSS, Perforce, and a few other high priced version control systems. About the only free solution back around 2000 was CVS, and that was just bad for other reasons.
(Some teams benefit from distributed version control systems like Mercurial/Git. Others benefit more from centralized VCS like SVN / TFS / Perforce. We prefer SVN because it is far easier for non-technical members, i.e. mere mortals, to understand and much harder for them to do the wrong thing.)
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
ESR has already helped several free software projects convert from CVS to Git using his existing computer. The bigger the project, the longer it takes. (Each attempt to convert the Emacs repos takes 8 hours with his current computer.) He has studied the C code for doing the conversion, and determined that the best sort of computer for doing these conversions would be as fast as possible (doesn't matter how many cores; this is a single-thread process) and would have as much RAM as possible. Graphics card? Whatever, who cares. Keyboard, mouse? Not going to buy those, he already has those. Oh, and he would prefer it not sound like a leaf blower so he is looking for quiet power supply and a case with large quiet fans.
He says that several people spontaneously donated money to help him buy a better computer. So he opened up a discussion for how to best spend the money.
Several people urged him to only use ECC RAM, which means either an AMD chip or a Xeon. Someone just donated $1000 (!!!) so he has pretty much settled on the Xeon.
Once he has this, he will go around to free software projects and offer to do the conversion for them. His plan is to grab a copy of the CVS repo, run the conversion to make sure there are no surprises, then ask the project maintainers to stop modifying the CVS repo while he runs the final conversion.
This seems like a reasonable service for him to be offering. Instead of each project figuring out the conversion process, he will become an expert on CVS to Git conversions (with more experience than anyone else) and he will have the purpose-built computer to do the conversions as quickly as possible. So he really will be saving time and hassle for the various projects.
P.S. He converted the NetHack repos, and stirred up a hornets' nest. Read about it here: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6389&cpage=1#comment-1207141
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely