[Frugalware-devel] Have you ever thought of changing the Frugalware SCM?

[Csaba Henk]

Hi!

Frugalware uses Darcs. And Darcs apparently doesn't scale with such a
volume.

As an end-user, the most annoying aspect of it is the unusuable slowness
of the web interface, but it also tells something that syncing the tree
happens via rsync instead of the native SCM pull operation these days.
(This slightly reminds me to this page:
http://xitami.org/xitami.org_on_apache ;) )
You should know these things better than me, so I don't think more words are
needed to describe the current situation.

(I also think that Darcs' version control semantics is flawed. I'm ready
to go into details if anyone is interested, but it would be OT at this
point. [And yes, I also think Darcs has some genious innovations.])

So I tried to convert frugalware-current to some other format via
Tailor [http://progetti.arstecnica.it/tailor]. Practically, I targeted
those two SCM-s which are known to be distributed and magnitudes faster
than their competitors are: Mercurial (aka. Hg) and Git.

First I tried Hg. It was not a trivial thing to do -- each changeset
is converted via a darcs pull/hg commit and 
'darcs pull --match "hash <whatever>"' took _minutes_ for each changeset.
This is no fun when you have over quarter-hundred thousand csets...

I succeeded to optimize this and get over the rest of the difficulties.
Here is the result:

   http://mercurial.creo.hu/repos/frugalware-current-hg-experimental/

It's not perfect though. There is a little delta from the original one.

Regarding Git: for some trivial Tailory problem I couldn't even start
the conversion. It should not be hard to come over but I was really
exhausted at this point and I need the time for other things in my life
and I don't know if you were interested at all. So I stopped playing
at this point.

This is just a short summary but if you see some reason in switching
the SCM, I can share my experience and I can go into details. (Given
that I spent so much time on the conversion I thought I give a chance
for these hours to not turn out to be a complete waste...)

Csaba