Re: [Gnu-arch-users] conversion of bitkeeper archive to tla

[John Meinel]

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Well, speaking as someone who actively uses tla on cygwin, I can say it
might be there enough. It's significantly slower than arch on linux (at
least an order of magnitude.) but Lode Leroy's path compression version
does work in most situations.

You can find the latest version at:
http://www.geocities.com/lode_leroy/arch

Basically all the problems boil down to Windows only allowing 256
characters in a path, and arch being a little bit verbose in it's
filesystem. There is work in making tla a little bit friendlier, and
there are a few workarounds.

My recommendation (as it is what I use) is to use Lode's dirnames
compression, and then be a little bit stingy with category--branch
names. You can get away with about 30 characters, but I wouldn't go much
above that. If you have a very large source tree, I would also recommend
splitting it up into multiple projects, which can be bound together with
a config.

When I say "large", I have one that is 2341 files, doing a "tla changes"
when it already has a pristine takes ???? seconds, building pristines is
even slower (as it path compresses them.) This isn't nearly as bad with
smaller projects. Again this order of magnitude is because of the path
compression, and probably some specific windows issues. (tla spawns
diff, and process creation is expensive under windows).

If I had to pick one, I would say Samba share will give you the best
performance. But my Linux box is over a 11MB wireless link through
several walls, so I haven't tried it. For me, building would take too
long on the share.

Currently there aren't any bitkeeper -> arch conversion scripts.

A simple thing that was mentioned, though. Just get each version of the
bk archive, and the check that into the arch one. I don't know bk well,
but I'm guessing you could just cut and paste the log. With only 20
changesets, I don't think it would be a lot of work.

John
=:->



Zenaan Harkness wrote:

| Hi, I was evaluating bitkeeper for the last couple of weeks, and have 20
| changesets, some pretty big, some very small, all nicely commented.
|
| The company I currently work for develops proprietary software, and pays
| my bills, and we have a Debian and a Windows developer. My understanding
| was that arch/tla on Windows is just not yet there, at least given our
| current work constraints (we're doing six day weeks). So that's why we
| went for bitkeeper.
|
| However, due to my stance on Free Software, freedom, and this comment
| about bitkeeper:
|
| http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnu-arch-users/2004-03/msg00933.html
|
| My team is being denied a commercial license to use bitkeeper.
| Apparently they fear people "feverishly developing a bitkeeper clone".
|
| So, I'm mostly over the emotional affrontation and need to get my
| bitkeeper tree into arch.
|
| If it's not possible or easy, I'll just start a new arch tree - that'll
| have to do. If it's possible to keep my comments, that would be nice.
|
| I'm about to launch properly into the arch tutorial, so hopefully in a
| week or two, I'll be in a position to manually merge my (currently
| single, but set to increase) coworker's changes - he's the Windows guy,
| I'm on Debian.
|
| I've almost never manually used diff and patch; the last two weeks with
| bitkeeper seemed very straightforward - I ran a stable tree, a work tree
| and a quick fixes tree (although never quite got up to speed with
| mid-development merging of changes from another branch, and got no
| answer on this from Bitmover, due to their deliberations in the last
| week over not selling us a license). My coworker had a clone of my
| stable tree, and I of his. He is not currently working within bitkeeper,
| so it's still very early days, thankfully.
|
| Thanks in advance
| Zenaan
|
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