Re: FreeBSD CVS Question

At 2:56 PM -0800 1/13/04, John Kennedy wrote:
>   With 5.x stabilizing, I'm looking at having multiple FreeBSD
>trees in play again and I'm trying to optimize my bandwidth.
>
>   Rather than hit the FreeBSD servers with multiple machines
>cvsuping 4.x and 5.x, I'm almost finished a scheme to cvsup
>the CVS sources and then do a local CVS checkout with the
>appropriate branch of FreeBSD.

Sad to say, I suspect you did a lot of extra work that you could
have avoided.

What I did was install the freebsd port named 'cvsup-mirror' on
one of my freebsd machines.  That port turns my machine into a
cvsup-server machine.  I customized it a bit, so I do not
mirror things like FreeBSD-www FreeBSD-gnats and FreeBSD-mail.

Then, for all my other freebsd machines, I just use the standard
cvsup control files, except that I point them at my machine
instead of a standard cvsup server.

>   Right now, this seems like a total win because I have a
>narrow pipe out to the big internet and fat pipe locally.

It depends on what you mean by "a local CVS checkout".  On the
machines which are doing a CVS checkout, how are they getting
to your local copy of the CVS repository?  If that repository
is NFS-mounted, then you are probably in good shape.  If your
machines are doing a CVS checkout over RSH or SSH, then your
server may be doing a LOT more work than you realize.

>...the only thing that seems to be wrong is the version IDs
>when the files get checkout out of RCS/CVS ("$FreeBSD$").  I'm
>assuming that is because FreeBSD has hacked up a copy of RCS
>and changed some of the names.

No, it's that the FreeBSD repository does some fairly clever
things with various files that it has in CVSROOT.  I am not
sure why you would not have those same files.

But really, you'd probably be better off investigating the
cvsup-mirror port.  It did not take me too long to setup,
and it has worked very well for me.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad_at_gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad_at_freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih_at_rpi.edu