Re: Let's stop using CVS for debian.org website

Neil McGovern <[email protected]> Mon, 21 Nov 2016 15:52:47 +0000

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.www,gmane.linux.debian.devel.general
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Hi there,

On Mon, Nov 21, 2016 at 04:17:27PM +0800, Boyuan Yang wrote:
> 在 2016年11月20日星期日 SGT 下午12:08:04，您写道：
> > For what it's worth, there's also git-cvsimport(1) and
> > git-cvsexportcommit(1) that can be used if someone really wants to
> > contribute and doesn't want to touch cvs itself.
> 
> Sure. I tried git-cvsimport to convert the cvs repo into a git repo (with -r 
> option enabled and -A disabled). The whole process took ~60 hours and the final 
> git bare repo is ~260MiB large.
> 
> I also found that the process is incremental after the initial import as long 
> as the history is not modified, which is a really good news for those who wants 
> to work on the transition.
> 

Thanks for that, it's certainly useful data!

> I think we can make a smooth transition through the following process:
> 
> * open a git repository under the webwml alioth team, make an initial import.
> * set up a crontab job somewhere (e.g., directly on alioth.d.o) and sync from 
> the cvs repository to git repository several times every day. Incremental 
> update is easy and can be finished within 10 minutes every time we sync them.
> * gradually port all potential infrastructures (e.g., tools used to update 
> debian.org website) from cvs repository to git repository.

This is the main issue - the actual tooling is fairly straightforward in
terms of the get-from-git-and-compile system, but there's a large
non-trivial amount of work for the translation systems.

Laura Arjona Reina is currently looking at this, and the current
thinking (AIUI) is that we need to:
* Update the translation system to use Po4a::Wml
* Deploy weblate for translations, or modify the process to use hashes
rather than version numbers
* Update large chunks of the site to use pofiles. Some files use it but
not for all content, and there's a number of files that don't use it at
all.

Help with the above is welcome :)

Neil

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