News – Page 67

Debian Documentation Project moved to SVN, webwml might follow

March 3, 2008 by Raphaël Hertzog

The topic of switching from CVS to something else regularly came forward but nobody did anything. The net result is that several documentation are now maintained outside of the debian-doc repository because their respective maintainers didn’t want to stay with CVS.

After noticing that the developers-reference also switched to SVN, I decided to convert the whole debian-doc CVS repository and import it in the new “ddp” SVN repository on Alioth. This is now done.

Hopefully, the Debian Documentation Project can now again become the central place for writing good documentation about Debian. New contributors can be easily added through the DDP Alioth project. Volunteers are welcome to review what’s in the SVN and move obsolete documentation aside. People who moved away are welcome back. 🙂

Another project that also suffers from its CVS usage is the website (and it desperately needs a better design). After yet another round of discussion on #debian-devel, we agreed that discussing endlessly was not an option and that someone had to try the conversion and prepare the scripts for SVN usage. So I proposed to handle the CVS to SVN conversion and ifvoid decided to try to update the scripts. And it looks like things are progressing quite well… we included the CVS revision -> SVN revision mapping in the conversion (option –cvs-revnums of cvs2svn) and this will enable us to script the update of all translations (they encode a CVS revision to know if they are out-of-date or not). Expect to hear from us soon on debian-www@lists.debian.org…

Unexpected move on the DSA front

November 3, 2007 by Raphaël Hertzog

One should never loose hope apparently. After my previous posts on the topic, Sam put some more pressure and expressed strongly his disappointment in the lack of progress on the DSA front and warned that he might have to look for more radical solution.

Phil Hands (who was really quiet in the discussions) decided that the situation had lasted long enough already and proposed to add Peter Palfrader (weasel@debian.org) to the team if nobody expressed any opposition in 24 hours. And this morning, Phil added weasel to the “adm” group… which make of Peter a full DSA member! 🙂

I really didn’t expect this outcome after so many months of negociations and discussions. But I’m really relieved to see some new blood in the DSA team. I wish him good luck and I’ll hope he will be able to foster cooperation with non-DSA people like I tried since the beginning of the year.

Thank you Phil!

Planet debian CVS repo superseded by SVN repository

August 27, 2007 by Raphaël Hertzog

When I discussed the deprecation of cvs.debian.org, I forgot to mention that planet’s CVS repository was also part of the last users of this service.

Thanks to mako, the move to Alioth is underway. The CVS repository has been disabled (crude hack, if you know a proper way to forbid commits to a CVS repository, please leave a comment) and its history has been imported in a new SVN repository

As usual DD have write-access on this repository so that they can add/update their feeds and hackergotchis. Mako will change the live setup from CVS to SVN somewhat later today.

Please start updating any documentation that refers to the CVS repository.

Deprecating cvs.debian.org in favor of Alioth

August 21, 2007 by Raphaël Hertzog

It’s very difficult to discuss with DSA and make things evolve if none of the DSA member express an interest in something related to your goal: here comes an example of a story like another in my desperate quest to try to help the DSA team. 🙂

Last time gluck ran out of space, a few non-DSA people (me, taggart, Ganneff, and others I might have forgotten) contacted people to ask them to clean their home directories. Following that discussion we discussed a bit about the opportunity to move some services from gluck on another host. Among the services on gluck, there’s cvs.debian.org. As an Alioth administrator, it struck me that cvs.debian.org is the only VCS service that’s handled by the DSA team. It seems logical to not duplicate the administrative work and have all the VCS repositories handled by the same team.

The logical conclusion is that cvs.debian.org should be deprecated in favor of Alioth. So I made the suggestion in RT ticket #146 (login with guest/readonly). I got exactly zero response from DSA. No support and no opposition. So I went ahead and contacted the last users of cvs.debian.org:

webwml: the website team
debian-doc: the Debian documentation project
debian-admin: the DSA team (this was already suggested in April this year in ticket #44, no response of course… except elmo saying me that he’s in favor. On IRC I also discovered that neuro doesn’t like bzr and is thus not in favor of such a move. Furthermore he visibly wants to keep control on userdir-ldap, thus he probably has not much interest in moving to a distributed system.)
buildd: the Packages-arch-specific file is maintained in the dak cvs…

All in all, the debian-doc and debian-www folks are rather supportive of the move, but it requires adjustment to the build infrastructure, in particular to keep track of the status of translations. I have no answer from DSA and the buildd guys however.

The web team started a wiki page to evaluate the VCS that they would switch to. Volunteers would be welcome to organize the conversion of the repositories and to fix the build infrastructure accordingly. This a nice little project for new contributors that want to learn. 🙂

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