Re: read-only git mirror of automake cvs repository

[Jim Meyering]

Benoit SIGOURE <address@hidden> wrote:

> On Oct 8, 2007, at 5:05 PM, Jim Meyering wrote:
>
>> I've set up a read-only git mirror of the automake cvs repository:
>
> Thank you!
>
>>
>>     http://sources.redhat.com/git/gitweb.cgi?p=automake.git
>>
>
> --18:05:43--  http://sources.redhat.com/git/automake.git/info/refs
>            => `refs'
> Resolving sources.redhat.com... 209.132.176.174
> Connecting to sources.redhat.com|209.132.176.174|:80... connected.
> HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 404 Not Found
> 18:05:43 ERROR 404: Not Found.
>
> git-clone uses curl and ends up saying:
>   Cannot get remote repository information.

Thanks.  That happened because I forgot to do this:

  chmod a+x .git/hooks/post-update

>   Perhaps git-update-server-info needs to be run there?

The post-update hook runs git-update-server-info
after each update.

>> It is updated from cvs every 15 minutes, but due to the way cvsps
>> works, it may take two iterations for a change in cvs to propagate
>> into the git tree.
>
> That's still great.  I wonder how you did this because I already tried
> several times to import the various autotools with git-
> cvsimport and it always miserably failed (for various reasons, but
> mainly because cvsps is a really dirty hack and its code has lots of
> bugs, some of which I had to fix so that it eventually finishes but
> the resulting Git repository had lots of corrupted commits).

I admit it was took more than a few iterations to get it right.
One of the big points was to realize that cvsps' cache was causing
trouble.  So I'm careful to make git-cvsimport run cvsps in such a
way that the cache can't interfere.
One way to do that is to point HOME= at an empty directory
for the git-cvsimport run.

I do have a script to help manage the process, ...
how about if you ping me about it in a week or so.