Re: Anybody home?

On 1/30/20 7:25 PM, Thomas Guyot-Sionnest wrote:
>
> Hi Lee,
> 
> On 2020-01-30 19:01, Lee Duncan wrote:
>> On 1/30/20 9:40 AM, Thomas Guyot-Sionnest wrote:
>>> I haven't seen a soul since I joined in November, but thanks for
>>> reminding me that I wanted to suggest an init script for sysfsutils.
>> What would it need to do at system startup time? Just curious.
> 
> Just to be sure, we're not talking of the same package; this SF project
> has many subprojects/code repos.

You lost me. Yes, I know sysfsutils seems to be just one of the packages
that got abandoned, but based on the number of downloads that
sourceforge lists, it's the most-used "module" by far.

If we wanted to use github for sources, it supports the concept of an
organization. For example, github.com/open-iscsi is a grouping, with
open-iscsi itself, open-isns, targetcli, open-isns, and target-isns
under it. Perhaps we could group the various CVS "modules", each as it's
own repo/project on github?

> 
> Debian added an init script in their sysfsutils package to set sysfs
> variables very similar to sysctl (in procps package). I have noticed it
> is missing in other distros, and I believe it would be a good thing to
> standardize on so application packagers could leverage /etc/sysfs.d/ to
> add important system tunings.

Yes, it looks like sysctl fills that need for SUSE/openSUSE (my distro).
But, if I understand correctly, many kernel folks say sysctl is evil and
broken. I'm no expert in that area.

> 
>> I tried to read from the CVS repo, which says it's read-only, but the
>> repo kept asking me for a password, so that got nowhere.
> 
>> But I found  https://github.com/Distrotech/sysfsutils
> 
>> Is that unofficial?
> It appears to be a private fork maintained by a South African company;
> see http://www.mzanziopensource.co.za/

Ah. That explains some. Like me (I'm guessing), they needed a place to
put the code so they could use it.

> 
>> Either way, I'd be glad to contribute. If the current git repo is close
>> enough, we can fork it and start from there.
> 
>> If it is not good enough (it has no version tags, and apparently no
>> support), we can use a tool (as you suggest) to import the CVS stuff and
>> start from there.
> 
>> This stuff seems to still have plenty of value.
> Yea... the tooling certainly improved... Subversion was notorious for
> failing to import branches, primarily because those were free-form and
> you could end up importing directories of branches. I haven't needed
> branches on my cvs imports but since it's implemented natively it should
> be easy.
> 
> Asides from that, Git normally has user name and email where CVS has
> only user id's, so a table is needed for conversion (for the email,
> <userid>@users.sourceforge.com generally works, and some users have made
> their name public, there could be other sources else the name will be
> only user id).

I take it you are talking about how to get the revision history
converted from CVS to git?

I was thinking more like this: leave the current CVS repository as it
is, or perhaps move it, if needed. Leave it as a read-only reference,
and start the github version from now, going forward. That would save a
ton of work. But, as a newcomer to these packages, I don't know how much
history would be mostly lost with this approach, or if such loss
matters. What do you think?

> 
> There's also the $Id$, $Author$ and similar tags. They need to be
> cleaned up in headers, and if they are also used in the code such as for
> generating version strings, they need to be replaced by something
> git-specific (ex git-describe) and run as a dependency to the build process.

I could easily fix that kind of stuff. And I could probably manage
trying to convert from CVS to git, as a side project (because it sounds
somewhat interesting, perhaps because I've never tried it).

I just don't want to make such changes in a vacuum, if others are still
using this software. After all, I believe open software has value
because multiple people can contribute. :)

Can you get me access to a CVS tree? As I said, I tried to get it from
sourceforge but ran into some sort of password issue.

> 
> Regards,
> 
> Thomas
>