Obsolete:Tracking Moodle CVS with git: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 04:07, 4 July 2006

Note: Work in progress. The information in the document has thus far been compiled by an individual who knows nothing of git or tracking Moodle CVS. The information has not been verified by an authoritative source. Do not follow these instructions. But do work to make them better.

Introduction

If you plan on doing complicated or sustained development on Moodle, you will benefit from a local revision control system. Centralized systems like CVS and SVN have limitied capabilities for tracking vendor branches. For the ultimate experience you will want to use a system with distributed capabilities, like SVK or (as covered in this article) git. Note: While it is possible to use git on Win32 via cygwin, the performance will suffer.

Obtaining git

You'll want:

Git (and its deps)
cvsps (a dependency of git-cvsimport)
an additional git porcelain (frontend)
- Cogito (offers an interface more familiar to CVS/SVN users)
- stgit (what's this do?)

Git is very heavily still in development at this time and using Git to track the changes to the Git sourcecode is highly recommended. Debian has packages available but they are very outdated compared with the latest stable version of Git. If you are actually using Git as a tool that you depend on you will want to get the latest changes and fixes as soon as they are released.

Importing CVS

To begin we must import the CVS repository into a local git filesystem using git-cvsimport.

#!/bin/bash
CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/moodle
MODULE=moodle
INSTALLDIR=moodle
git-cvsimport -p x -v -k -d $CVSROOT -C $INSTALLDIR $MODULE &> cvsimport.log

(When might one want to use the -m -u and -s flags?)

-u purely cosmetic
-s slashes can cause problems but this doesn't seem to be the case with moodle
-m ?

This will run for a very long time as it checks out every revision of each file (including all branches). However, if you run the command after a successful initial run it will simply get the new revisions since it was last run. This creates a new git repository which can then be cloned and worked upon. At the time of writing the size of a new Moodle git repository was approximately 866MB.

TODO: investigate the utility of downloading a CVS repo tarball from SourceForge as demonstrated in this script.

Creating a Working Copy

In order to use your repository you must clone yourself a working copy using git-clone-pack.

(Let's assume your destination directory above was /pub/scm/moodle)

mkdir ~/git/moodle
cd ~/git/moodle
git clone-pack /pub/scm/moodle.git

This will clone the git filesystem you created from the CVS import into a working copy that you may make changes to and commit to. You can then get updates from the main git repository that will be merged in amongst the changes to your local copy.

If you are using the Cogito tools, you can use cg-clone to do this instead:

cg-clone /pub/scm/moodle.git ~/git/moodle

Helpful Documentation

git tutorial
git for CVS users
git-cvsimport man page
cogito man pages
git man pages
The Git mailing list
kernel.org Gitweb interface (Browse the Git and assosciated tools' repositories)

Moodle Forum Discussions

@@ Line 33: / Line 33: @@
 This will run for a '''very''' long time as it checks out every revision of each file (including all branches).  However, if you run the command after a successful initial run it will simply get the new revisions since it was last run.  This creates a new git repository which can then be cloned and worked upon. At the time of writing the size of a new Moodle git repository was approximately 866MB.
-TODO: investigate the utility of downloading a CVS repo tarball from SourceForge as demonstraited in [http://www.progsoc.org/~wildfire/git/update-repo.sh this script].
+TODO: investigate the utility of downloading a CVS repo tarball from SourceForge as demonstrated in [http://www.progsoc.org/~wildfire/git/update-repo.sh this script].
 ==Creating a Working Copy==