Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: big repositories inconveniences (partial pull?)

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Wed, Aug 23, 2006 at 08:47:55PM +0200, Lapo Luchini wrote:
> What about the following sentence in wiki?
> "There is an important limitation, though. This method doesn't
> presently try to attach branches to their parents, either on the
> mainline or on other branches, instead each CVS branch gets its own
> separate linear history in the resulting monotone db."
> Does it still apply to cvs_import? Does it apply to cvs_sync (and/or
> will apply to your "complete redesign"?)

There is a branch called .cvsimport-branch-reconstruction which
attempts to do this.  It hasn't been merged or anything, because
everyone was too cowardly to figure out how it was supposed to work
and whether its approach was plausible or not :-(.

I ported it forward to current mainline a week or two ago (had to port
the tests, mainly), and it seems to have bit-rotten slightly -- its
branch tests are failing, but in ways that make it look like it's
_really close_ to correctly reconstruction the branches.  There are
probably just some stupid bugs.

If anyone can figure out how to make it pass its own tests, then we
can merge it into mainline, probably as an optional feature for now.
(The idea would be that since CVS is so horrid, there will certainly
be repos that at first we fail to reconstruct branches on.  We want
the functionality in mainline so that we can discover which repos
those are, but we don't want to leave people with such repos stuck,
either.)

> What I'm looking for is mainly a way to fully import a locally
> available CVSROOT in a monotone database most closely as possible as
> the original data and keeping it in sync one-way, two-way sync or
> remote sync is only a plus.

There's no deep reason cvs_import couldn't be incremental.  In fact,
it probably almost works right now.  Just, nobody's done testing and
fixed any bugs or written any test cases for this.

-- Nathaniel

-- 
Eternity is very long, especially towards the end.
  -- Woody Allen