Re: irc usage..

On 5/23/06, Linus Torvalds [off-list ref] wrote:

I don't think the remote usability is valid, except for some really small
repositories. The fact that it takes hours even when the CVS server is
local doesn't bode well for doing it remotely for any but the most trivial
things.

I really don't think that using the local cvs binary is a problem at
all. In my experience, the thing is fairly fast and optimized when you
ask it to perform file-oriented questions and that's all we do,
really.

If you want to try it, you'll see that local checkouts of large trees
(like this gentoo one) are fairly fast. Not as fast as GIT itself, but
good enough. I think Donnie has hit a bug with a bad version of cvs,
but other than that, my experience with it is that it is fairly well
behaved -- even if the tool is bad, ubiquity has lead to resiliency
over the years.

I really think it would be better to have local use be the optimized case,
with remote being the "it's _possible_" case.

Agreed, but I think we won't see much benefit in direct parsing. And
we'll have to take the hit of double-implementation.

In any case, we have it already -- parsecvs does it quite well (modulo
memory leaks!) and I've used it several times in conjunction with
cvsimport. Just perform the initial import with parsecvs and then
'track' the remote project with cvsimport.

The problem is that they lead to slightly different trees. So their
output is not consistent, and I don't think that'll be easy to fix.

cheers,


martin