hosting git conversion of Fedora CVS tree on fedora infrastructure?

[Mike McGrath]

Lennert Buytenhek wrote:
> Hi,
>
> For a while now, I've been maintaining a git conversion of the
> Fedora CVS tree, pulling in a copy of the CVS tree via rsync, and
> running some local scripts to convert that to git, incrementally
> updating the git tree as commits are made to the CVS tree.
>
> (For more background info, see here:)
>
> 	https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2007-November/msg00561.html
>
> I think most of the issues with the conversion have been worked
> out, and I'd like to make this available to the World in some way.
> I was wondering whether it makes sense to host something like this
> on Fedora infrastructure.
>
> Note that this is _not_ a proposal to replace CVS by git.
>
> The git tree is currently a read-only (slave) version of the CVS
> tree, and I expect it to stay that way for some time.  But even though
> Fedora isn't switching VCSes at this point, I think it would still
> make sense to have git/hg/random-other-VCS conversions of the Fedora
> CVS tree publically available, for a number of reasons:
> - Give package maintainers the option of working with their favorite
>   VCS for local development (while continuing to use CVS when
>   committing things upstream.)
> - All the advantages of other version control systems over CVS, e.g.:
>   - Give people the opportunity to pull a local copy of the entire
>     tree or parts of the tree for local browsing of packages and
>     their history without having to go through the server (CVS
>     doesn't support this, although you _could_ just rsync the
>     entire CVS tree to your local machine...)
>   - Allow stacking commits, reverting commits, merging commits,
>     splitting commits, reordering commits, etc., before the changes
>     are pushed into the CVS tree and become final.
>   - Allow easy maintaining of local branches of packages.
>
> What would be needed to host this on Fedora infrastructure:
> - Some disk space.  The size of the converted git tree is about 725
>   megabytes after packing, but for experimenting it would be good to
>   have a bit more space available, say, 10G or so.
> - Open ports.  For browsing the git tree via the web, port 80 access
>   would be needed, and for allowing people to clone the tree over
>   git://, port 9418 access would be useful.
> - Read-only access to the ,v files in the CVS tree, say, over NFS.
>
> Ideas?
>
>   

This sounds like something we could do, but I don't think we should do 
it.  For one, after we move the hosted stuff away from cvs-int, that box 
will get a complete makover and one that, as far as I can tell, won't 
include git.  I'm not sure what problem this solves really.

If there is a real need in Fedora to use git, why not just put together 
a proposal for migrating cvs to git?  Lots of people have tried this, 
its not an easy task.  But adding an additional SCM for GIT which is 
JUST a copy of what's in CVS sounds like a waste of our resources.  Why 
not also do SVN, BZR and Mercurial?

    -Mike