I had hoped that all the buildfarm members would be able to run git, and we could just forget about CVS. Sadly, this turns out not to be the case. Plan B, therefore, is to run git-cvsserver. This turns out to have a few oddities, in particular in treating a git branch as a CVS module. This mean I've had to make some adjustments to the buildfarm client which expects to deal with a single CVS module called 'pgsql'.
We've had some discussions over how to restrict what can be checked out, mainly because git-cvsserver creates a large database for each branch or head that is checked out, so we really only want to support a small number of branches (i.e. those that the buildfarm is interested in). I think we have managed to resolve that.
Initial setup of these databases takes quite a bit of time. I wonder if the git-cvsserver author(s) ever tried it on a seriously large repository. On my setup, creating the initial PostgreSQL databases takes about 30 minutes per branch. Once it's set up it's quite fast, however.
There will be a few limitations:
We've had some discussions over how to restrict what can be checked out, mainly because git-cvsserver creates a large database for each branch or head that is checked out, so we really only want to support a small number of branches (i.e. those that the buildfarm is interested in). I think we have managed to resolve that.
Initial setup of these databases takes quite a bit of time. I wonder if the git-cvsserver author(s) ever tried it on a seriously large repository. On my setup, creating the initial PostgreSQL databases takes about 30 minutes per branch. Once it's set up it's quite fast, however.
There will be a few limitations:
- CVS export mode is not supported by git-cvsserver. That's no great loss
- There are no .cvsignore files any more, at least in the master branch, so buildfarm owners will have to make sure they keep their repos really clean, and vpath builds probably won't work. And no, we can't use the .gitignore files that have been set up - at least not easily and I'm not inclined to put much effort into trying.
- The changed files will be reported to the buildfarm web site, but the links there will be nonsense, at least for now. git-cvsserver invents a CVS revision number for the files, but the only place it stores the link from that to the git filehash and commithash values is in its private database. We'd need a way to get that table to the buildfarm, or a way of having the buildfarm server query it on the fly over a SOAP interface or similar. I'm not sure if that's worth doing, although it would not be hard. I wonder how many people follow those links.