Re: Maintenance of the Hurd parts in glibc (was: about GNU Hurd)

[Michael Banck]

Hi,

On Tue, Jul 24, 2007 at 06:49:12PM +0200, Pierre THIERRY wrote:
> Maybe it would help to lower entry barriers for the project. A
> distributed version control helps technically.

What I think is most important is that people can easily locally
branch/merge the master (CVS) repository with their favourite DVCS, be
it git, bzr, darcs or mercurial.

I understand this is much easier with subversion than cvs (I know people
who transparently use git-over-svn when maintaining Debian packages at
svn.debian.org, the only strange thing you see is the "Signed-off-by"
notice), and apparently it's similarly easy with bzr; dunno about darcs
and mercurial.

As Savannah does not provide subversion, we are stuck with cvs for the
time being, but it should also be possible here, albeit with a bit more
pain I guess.

A DVCS really makes most sense when you have loads of contributors and
loads of branches (like Linux, X.org, gcc); we'd probably very quickly
have more `first-level repositories' than actual users...

And on another (personal) note, as long as glibc can apparently be
maintained in CVS, it's sort of presumptious to think the Hurd needs
something better...

Adding a git repository mirroring the (master) CVS repository at
savannah would be cool I guess, but I am not sure switching over to git at
this point has any big advantages compared to the (also present)
drawbacks.

> Maybe we could mirror Hurd's CVS to some DVCS and see if it helps.
> I've already tailored it to Mercurial, if someone is interested:
> 
> http://arcanes.fr.eu.org/~pierre/2007/07/hurd/

That's awesome (really!); are you keeping it up-to-date, or is this a
one-time shot?

We should collect that (and possibily other DVCS mirrors) at least at
the wiki or maybe even http://hurd.gnu.org (if this is going to be a
somewhat permanent service).


Michael