In Progress

Well… We’re still at the ‘Where?’ stage with the Subversion conversion. And I certainly don’t see any. As most of you who may follow this blog are aware, the OpenNMS project’s conversion to Subversion DIDN’T go off without a hitch as I had hoped. It is nothing more than a comedy of errors at our beloved SourceForge. Here’s what’s happened so far:

1. I closed CVS so no one could check anything in so that I didn’t miss anyone’s changes. This step was the one step that worked successfully
2. Next, I went over to the SVN migration page and clicked the ‘Migrate from SF.net CVS repository’ button and waited. I suspected this would go well. I had tested this out a month ago and everything went very smoothly and in only 15 minutes or so I had a Subversion repository that had all of our CVS data in it including all the versions.Unfortunately that was not the case this time. After running the converter multiple times with various options I still get a failed status report and an empty Subversion repository.
3. Fortunately, SourceForge was very forthcoming about the fact that at times the cvs2svn command will fail and the provide explicit instructions on how to obtain a tarball of your entire CVS repository and then use the cvs2svn utility yourself to create a svndump file that you can import instead. So I set about trying to locate a working cvs2svn to try.
4. As luck would have it David Hustace has recently publish ‘Zen and The Art of Linux Box Maintenance (subtile) Hey Deb, Its Apt to be Yummy’ and now I finally have a system that has the 1.3.x version of Subversion which is what SourceForge is using and the 1.3.0 version of cvs2svn. I figured if I used the same version I would have an improved chance of getting by without problems. HA! This took a little while but we finally got there.
5. I thought, “Great! Now I’ll just get the tarball, convert it, and upload it. It’s all good.” So the first thing I did was download it from SF. It downloaded and I tried to unzip/untar it. Uh oh! Its corrupt! Well I’ll download it again. On no still corrupt! Hmm… I’ve seen my Mac complain about ‘tar’s everyone once in a while so just to be safe I’ll try on Linux.
6. Over on a Linux system I tried using wget. The connection kept dropping after 40 or so MB. I tried again. Same problems. The must have their filewall set to drop connections that last too long. That’s probably the same problem that Subversion is having when trying to checkout all of our code on MacOSX. (See the SubversionIssues page in the wiki for more detail on that.) So I finally remember (aka look up) the continue flag in wget so I can download all of the tarball (which by the way is 113MB) and after three attempts I get the entire things downloaded. On to cvs2svn!!!
7. Since the tarballs are ‘nightly tarballs’ according to the SF docs I figure I’ll ‘practice’ on this one and use the one for the next night for the ‘actual’ conversion since some things had been checked in today. But at least I’ve gotten it down and I can try it. Before I do however I decided to look at the wepage I pulled this from and see what time it was created so I’ll know time the next one will be available. So I am finally able to get the page to load that lists all the tarballs included ours (its very long) and I see the timestamp. That’s great 29-Mar-2006 22:07. 22:07 so that means…. 29-Mar!!!!! You mean this hasn’t been updated since 29-Mar?! I quickly untar it. Look into the toplevel. *SIGH* No opennms-model diretory. That’s where all our DAOs live.
8. OK. So I now I can’t convert using their tool… I can’t get a repository tarball to use cvs2svn. Now what!? I opened a Priority Support Ticket (since I am a SF subscriber) to see if they can create a new tarball for me. But until I get one I don’t know how to move on. If I reopen CVS than any tarball I get may be out of date! Ben Reed with his Master’s degree in ‘How to Find Cool Stuff that No One’s Even Heard Of’ helped me find a tool called cvssuck That will rebuild a CVS repository using only CVS client access. I thought I could at least start that to see what I end up because it will take a very long time. Just as I was about to start can you guess what happened? That’s right SF’s entire network crashed. Oh well… I guess I’m done.

Its been a long process and hopefully it will get resolved soon but until then the Subversion conversion is still ‘In Progress’

I’ll keep you posted,
Matt

PS Two points to anyone who knows where the title comes from and posts in a comment. 5 points to anyone who knows the words that follow it!