Re: cvs access to gnulib?

[Bruno Haible]

Hi Karl,

> Was the cvs access to git intentionally shut down?
> (Sorry if I missed the announcement.)
> As of some time ago -- looks like it might have been six months, call me
> late! -- I am seeing:
> 
>     cvs [update aborted]: connect to [pserver.git.sv.gnu.org]:2401 failed:
>     Connection timed out

Indeed, same for me.

It was probably not intentional, but it is not a big loss either: The
cvs-from-git view did not cope well with added or removed files, IIRC.

The last modification date of gitcvs-db in
  http://git.savannah.gnu.org/r/gnulib.git/
is 2011-07-11.

> Alternatively, is it possible to tell git "I only want to clone one
> subdirectory" (namely build-aux)?  All the incantations I tried failed.

Results of a web search for "git clone subdirectory": There are apparently
two ways to do it:
  - git filter-branch [1]
  - git sparse checkouts [2]

But both approaches likely assume a local copy of the entire git repository.

If you need only specific files, you can do so through 'wget'. I have this
code in gettext's autogen.sh:

  for file in config.guess config.sub; do
    wget -q --timeout=5 -O build-aux/$file.tmp 
"http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=gnulib.git;a=blob_plain;f=build-aux/${file};hb=HEAD";
 \
      && mv build-aux/$file.tmp build-aux/$file \
      && chmod a+x build-aux/$file
  done

Listing a subdirectory's contents through the gitweb interface is
certainly doable as well.

Bruno

[1] 
http://www.pither.com/articles/2009/02/04/extracting-a-subdirectory-from-git-as-a-new-git-repository
[2] 
http://blog.quilitz.de/2010/03/checkout-sub-directories-in-git-sparse-checkouts/