[cairo] CVS bridge not likely to happen

Wed Apr 19 13:25:00 PDT 2006

On Thu, 06 Apr 2006 15:36:59 -0700, Carl Worth wrote:
> 
> There are two things I will be doing as soon as possible to make it
> easier for people to test things. First, I'll be setting up a git2cvs
> bridge. This will allow people to use things like jhbuild (which talks
> CVS but doesn't talk git) to be able to build/test cairo.

Hrmph. I haven't made demonstrable progress on this point yet. I got
push-back from the admins of the freedesktop.org server who are not
yet comfortable with the (in)security aspects of the current
git-cvsserver code, (in the most recent announcement, the author of
that software himself said the code has not been reviewed for security
purposes and shouldn't be deployed on production servers).

So a better route here would likely be to just teach jhbuild how to
talk git. With current git, cloning a repository requires getting all
history since the beginning. For cairo this isn't huge (roughly 11MB)
so if it's the only git-backed thing being fetched by jhbuild it
wouldn't be too unreasonable I don't think.

It might not be so nice if using jhbuild required downloading all of
GNOME history. But, it also doesn't appear that GNOME is about to
switch from CVS to git. And, before GNOME does make that decision,
there will probably be new "shallow clone" support in git to alleviate
this issue.

(And in the meantime, there are various hacks that could be used to
also alleviate the big initial download. Kristian has one implemented
here http://people.freedesktop.org/~krh/git-snap/ and I've got another
idea I should write up. These have the advantage of not requiring
changes to the git protocol, (or in the case of Kristian's git-snap,
not even requiring a git client at all).)

So that's probably a topic to take up with the jhbuild folks. But the
important thing here is that I'm now convinced that unless something
changes, that a git-to-cvs bridge probably won't be appearing for
cairo. So I'll be committing a final change to the copy of cairo in
CVS that changes autogen.sh, configure, and make to print a message
explaining why the CVS version of cairo is obsolete, and giving
instructions on how to move to the git version of cairo.

>                                                           Second, I'll
> be posting regular snapshots throughout the remainder of the 1.2
> development cycle.

Here, again, is something that hasn't happened yet. I've been wanting
to at least have rudimentary vector-based PostScript and PDF output
working. I think that's basically in place now as of some very recent
PDF commits I pushed.