Re: [f-cpu] There's something going wrong here...

[Michael Riepe <michael@stud.uni-hannover.de>]

This is going to be long, but I suggest you read it carefully
anyway...

On Thu, Jun 13, 2002 at 01:14:22PM +0200, Christophe wrote:
[...]
> Grrr, I'm not the one who wants to move anything to another sites !!!! I was
> only asking for a true official and frequently updated homepage and global
> repositary. That's all. I don't care where they could be so long time as they
> are easily accessed and maintainable in one spot.

If you had asked me (or Yann) before, I would have told you that seul.org
is our main site. There is a CVS there (although we don't use it yet),
there also is a homepage and an FTP server, and many of us have personal
accounts there. We're just too lazy^H^H^H^Hbusy to update the homepage
every other day. Of course that won't change just because we move to
another site.

The question is: what do you expect? There will be no daily bulletin
saying "Good morning, it's a new day and the F-CPU project is still
alive and well" (I can install a cron job to send you messages like that).

If somebody wants to participate, the first thing to do is to join this
mailing list (not the french one!). Here you'll get all the important
news - including announcements for new uploads on seul. You can talk to
other project members, ask questions and so on.

There's no need to install a WWW forum, and there is very good reason
*not* to do so: we need to keep *all* discussions in a central point.
The french mailing list is already too much. I've complained several times
that important things were discussed there, although they really belong
*here*. And don't suggest that I join that list, too - I don't speak
french good enough to follow, and you don't understand german, do you?
We *have* to discuss things in english, and we have to do that *here*,
and nowhere else. That's what I've been preaching for more than a year
now, but obviously nobody was listening :(

Finally, the repository. We've been talking about that a long time ago.
We even developed a directory structure for it which is at least partially
reflected in Yann's and my source archives (his are more complete,
I usually only upload the parts I maintain myself, to keep download
times short). But there are still a number of problems to solve.

First of all, I (and everybody else who uses CVS locally) can't commit
to the central repository. When I type `cvs ci' in my working tree, I
will commit to my *local* CVS. That is, I either have to keep the global
repository checked out and copy files between two independent working
directories (this is awful and error-prone), or `cvs import' my files
to the central repository. The latter is the preferred method, but if
one isn't careful (and aware of CVS' numerous pitfalls), one may trash
the rest of the repository.

In particular, if two people are allowed to update the same directory,
and one of them adds a file, that file will be lost if the other one
imports his version (without the new file). This does not happen with
the usual checkout/commit/update sequence, but as I mentioned before,
that's impossible - I can't switch repositories, and I can't work with
the global one by default either. The only solution is to give only
one person write access to a particular directory, but that makes things
difficult again, because we have shared directories (like vhdl/common)
where files from different developers accumulate. That is, one of us
must become the official maintainer for that directory, and everybody
else must pass his changes to him, or we need to split vhdl/common into
subdirectories (common/mr, common/yg and so on). Both solutions are ugly.

We get even bigger problems when two people create new subdirectories with
the same name. Let's say both Yann and I create vhdl/blah. Yann imports
his version first. When I import my files, his will be lost.  When you
commit files, cvs will warn you if somebody else has changed them since
you checked out, but there is no security check when you *import* them.

As you can see, it's hard to get things right but it's pretty easy
to fuck up the repository. The probably best solution is a single CVS
maintainer who grabs the sources when we release them, resolves all the
issues mentioned above, and updates the repository. It's a hairy job,
and if one of you wants it, he can have it. But don't say you haven't
been warned.

These facts are of course independent of the location of the homepage or
the repository. Therefore, a move can not be the answer; it just poses
more questions. I suggest that you think about the existing questions
instead, and try to solve the existing problems, instead of creating
new ones.

-- 
 Michael "Tired" Riepe <Michael.Riepe@stud.uni-hannover.de>
 "All I wanna do is have a little fun before I die"
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