Tag Archives: cvs

Open Source, Web

roffit lives!

Many moons ago I created a little tool I named roffit. It is just a tiny perl script that converts a man page written in the nroff format to good-looking HTML. I should perhaps also add that I didn’t find any decent alternatives then so I wrote up my own version. I’ve been using it since in projects such as curl, c-ares and libssh2 to produce web versions of the docs.

It has just done its job and I haven’t had any needs to fiddle with it. The project page lists it as last modified in 2004, even though I actually moved it to a sourceforge CVS repo back in 2007.

Just a few days ago, I got emailed and was notified that Debian has it included as a package in the distribution and someone was annoyed on some particular flaws.

This resulted in a bunch of bugs getting submitted to the Debian bug tracker, I started up the brand new roffit-devel mailing list to easier host roffit discussions and I switched over the CVS repo to a git one on github.

If you like seeing man pages turned into web pages, consider joining up and help us improve this thing!

cURL and libcurl, Open Source

curl goes git

3 Comments

Just a few days ago the curl project turned twelve years old, and I decided that it was time for us to ditch our trusty old CVS setup and switch over to use git instead for source code control.

Why Switch at All

I’ve been very content with CVS over the years and in our small project we don’t really have any particularly weird or high demands on the version control software.

Lately (like in recent years) I’ve dipped my toes into various projects that have been using git, and more and more over time I’ve learned to appreciate the little goodies that git does that CVS simply cannot. I’m then not even speaking about branches or merges etc that git does a whole lot better and easier than CVS, I’m in fact even more in love with git’s way to ease handling with diffs sent by email and its great way of keeping track of authors separately from the committer etc. git am and git commit –author are simply two very handy tools missing in CVS.

Why Git

So if we want to switch from CVS to another tool what would we chose? That wasn’t really the question in my case so I didn’t answer it. In my case, it was rather that I’ve been using git in several projects and it is used in some of the biggest projects I work with so it was some git’s features I wanted. I didn’t consider any of the other distributed version tools as quite frankly: they wouldn’t be much better for me than what CVS already is. I want to reduce the number of different tools I need, and I’m quite sure anyway that git is one of the top contenders even if I would do an actual comparison.

So the choice to go git was quite selfish and done by me, but I felt that quite a few guys in the curl community supported this decision and very few actually believe remaining with CVS was a better idea.

The fact that git itself uses libcurl for its HTTP access of course also proves its good taste! 🙂

How did the conversion go

Very easy and swiftly. First, as I mentioned above we never used branches much so we basically had a linear development with a set of tags. I did an rsync of the full repo to get a local copy to work with, then I ran ‘git cvsimport’ on that to created a new repo. I did run it a couple of times to make sure I had done a correct mapping of all CVS user names to their git equivalents. Converting >10 years of CVS commits took roughly 10 minutes on my desktop machine so it wasn’t that tedious even.

Once I had a local repo created with all authors looking good, I simply followed the instructions on github.com on how to add a remote origin to a local branch and when I pushed to that, git sent off all commits ever made to curl to the remote repo now exposed to the world from github.com.

cURL

When that part was done, I did a quick read on the ‘git help daemon’ docs and 30 seconds later I had a local repo setup that is a mirror of the github one, so that users can still opt to get the code from haxx.se.

Unchanged work flow

Git allows different ways of working with the code, but I’ve decided that at least as a start we won’t change the way we work. I’ll offer all committers push rights to the master branch on the repository and we will simply all push to that, as our head development branch.

We will prefer patches made with git format-patch sent to the mailing list, but as before you can still produce patches by diffing source code using extracted tarballs or whatever approach you prefer.

All details on how to get the code for curl using git is available online.

cURL and libcurl

Why curl sticks with CVS

Occasionally people ask me or just mock me because we’re still using CVS in the curl project, even though there are much more compelling alternatives out there now. Subversion, git, Bzr, Mercurial, etc. I am even a contributor and committer in the Subversion project. (Although I’ll be the first to admit that I never committed much and the stuff I did was done many years ago.)

CVS just isn’t bad enough to warrant the work of a replacement. curl is a tiny project (source code wise) and while CVS has several flaws in how it is designed and works, those flaws never hurt us much. Basically the only one is the lack of rename support and that has no major impact on us.

On the contrary, CVS has the upside of being established and rock solid since many years so people on all sorts of platforms can use it and get the curl source code. This is important especially for our automated build-system which we try hard to find volunteers for to run automatically daily around-the-clock (the results and outputs are then mailed to our central autobuild master server that collects and presents them) and then those guys need to be able to checkout the code easily. Using more modern tools will make it harder since those aren’t available as widely as binary packages for as many (outdated) platforms as CVS is.

So curl sticks with CVS for now.