Tim and all,

On Tue, 15 Jun 2004, Tim Jenness wrote:

> All I'm really saying is that if we actually have the SCCS/CVS files or
> original .gen then I'd advocate starting from them rather than doing a
> fresh import from the tar ball and losing the history and/or original
> source.

I agree. If there are private SCCS/RCS/CVS files for a package that
hasn't been put into the repository yet, then yes, we should use these
rather than what's in /stardev/sources.

If there's something that has been put into the repository from the
tarballs, for which there are freshly-discovered SCCS/RCS/CVS files
(as is the case for NDF), then it would probably be good to merge that
history IF the files haven't diverged too far. I think it was Tim who
outlined a procedure for this earlier today. We should be terribly
disciplined about this, though, and if it looks like taking more than
a couple of hours, then just not do it; and certainly not do it during
the CVS-week.

Those things that we can't merge now will probably never get merged
(as Tim says). This probably isn't a big deal, since we know that
what's there at present works. What we'd have lost is the history, and
we can keep that by putting those discovered repositories in a separate
place in the CVS tree -- /code-archive, for example. If you have a RCS
repository in this category (possibly a SCCS repository converted to
RCS), then create a subdirectory /code-archive/blah on saturn, give it
the correct permissions (copied _carefully_ from other CVS directories),
and dump all the RCS files in. Those files' history can then be examined
in the usual CVS way, when necessary, without them having to be merged
anywhere (this was DLG's suggestion).

> Of course, the fact that we have .gen files for NDF and HDS now is a
> problem since, of course, those are already in CVS. It's not a priority to
> add those now, I'll put it on my todo list for when I've done GKS and AGI!
> At least .gen files can be added after the fact without direct
> manipulation of the repository.

It's probably pretty easy to switch back to .gen files during any
routine maintainance. And if there's no such maintainance, then
there's no need to do it.

How does that sound?

Norman


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Norman Gray http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/norman/
Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK [log in to unmask]