[Monotone-devel] State of mtn - CVS syncing

[William Uther]

Hi all,

  I just thought I'd send out a brief update on the state of mtn<- 
>CVS syncing.  (I'm talking about a gateway between mtn and CVS, not  
a one-off transfer of information.  There are other branches for that.)

A while ago I made a branch from Christof's cvssync trunk.  He did  
most of the heavy lifting, and I've just been playing around the  
edges.  I do not have a great understanding of the CVS linkage.  With  
that acknowledgment/disclaimer, this is what I have done:

The net.venge.monotone.cvssync.attrs branch is a usable, but not  
polished, cvs-sync.  It stores the sync information in attributes,  
using a cert to mark which revisions are actually in sync.  When  
pulling from CVS, new revs are made as children of the last sync'd  
rev.  When pushing to CVS, only revs which children of the last  
sync'd rev are pushed.  At the end of a push a new rev is committed  
to mtn with the updated sync attributes.

I've been using this system for a while, tracking some development  
here that was mainly being done in CVS.  It basically works well.   
There are problems with more advanced features of MTN.  e.g. I've had  
problems when I've added a new directory hierarchy in mtn, and I want  
to push it to CVS.

Rather than fix those problems, I've just assumed that new directory  
hierarchies can be created in CVS.  I have added an --extended- 
checking flag to "pull" which, as the name suggests, performs  
extended checking.  It also causes mtn_cvs to try to fix any sync  
issues it finds.  Some history information may be lost, but it seems  
to at least bring the heads back into sync.

The branch itself is originally a branch of the main monotone trunk.   
mtn_cvs is a directory that requires it be placed inside a monotone  
source dir to build.  There are also a few small changes you need to  
make to that main source dir.  I've pulled these out into a mtn_cvs/ 
mainline.patch file.  This allows the use of mtn_cvs with a checkout  
of the mainline: apply the patch to your mainline, copy the mtn_cvs  
dir from the branch into your mainline source dir, and then re- 
acinit, autoconf and make.

I hope others find this useful.

Cheers,

Will          :-}