Migrating to Subversion

Migrating from CVS to Subversion is an ASF Infrastructure desired event for Jakarta.

• See the Version Control page for usage details.

• See the cvs2svn page for conversion details.

Plan

• Every sub-project of Jakarta gets a subdirectory in the Jakarta SVN repo.
• They use a tags/trunk/branches structure within said subdirectory, though they could further componentise and then use the tags/trunk/branches structure if it fits them better.
• The CVS repositories of "dead" projects are not targeted for immediate migration (e.g. jakarta-site).

Positives

Subversion provides many advantages over CVS, smoothing out its "excessive character" while providing the same approximate level of functionality, and a much better designed platform on which to develop tools. Sampling of improvements over CVS:

• move files within the repository and maintain the history
• delete directories (which are treated no different than any other versioned resource)
• treat groups of files in one commit as a single transaction (change set-like)
• significantly faster branching and tagging

Another major benefit is that administration of Subversion simplifies the life of the Infrastructure team. UNIX accounts need not be created for each user; user accounts are instead maintained in htaccess files, with authentication occuring over SSL.

Questions

• Is the community's toolset fully supported?

Negatives

• The tagging and branching model varies from that of CVS, and is only a "cheap" directory copy. Tags which are more than a simple directory tree get trickier. ie) tagging without tagging all the files, or tagging plus a set of files in a sibling directory. The trick of doing 'cvs status -v build.xml' to list known tags for a module is no longer available as well. Instead, the "tags/" directory in the repository may be browsed using a 'svn ls' or a web browser.

• Obliteration of files which should have never made their way into the VC repository (e.g. files with a non-ASF allowed license) can currently only be accomplished through a dump/edit/load of the entire repository by the Infrastructure team (resulting in a repository-wide maintenance window).

Migration Plan

To do

• Cactus - Vincent Massol. Renudged.
• JMeter - Nudge sent.
• POI - (In test repo)

• Tapestry - Nudged. Is Subclipse good enough?

Archivals

• Alexandria - Archive. Will do this last.
• jakarta-site
• all the java.apache.org modules

DONE

• BCEL - Henri Yandell
• BSF - (done)

• Commons - Martin Cooper + Tim O'Brien - Conversion Instructions

• ECS - Robert Burell Donkin + Henri Yandell. jakarta-ecs and jakarta-ecs2.

• HiveMind - (done)

• JCS - (done)
• Lucene - Erik Hatcher
• ORO - Daniel Savarese
• Regexp - Henri Yandell

• Site2 - Tim O'Brien + Henri Yandell - Site2_Conversion_Instructions

• Slide - Stefan Lützkendorf.

• Taglibs - Henri Yandell using Adapted Commons Scripts Test Repo scripts.tgz(200k)

• Turbine - (done)
• Velocity - Daniel Rall