A Wicket Diary

As mentioned earlier on this blog, Wicket is moving its repository from CVS to subversion. Here’s a small entry on how we did the conversion.

First we tried the automatic conversion utility offered by sourceforge, but that borked with an unexplained error, insisting that we use the cvs2svn utility.

I downloaded the CVS tarball, to discover that it was a very old copy dating from January 24th 2006. No matter, we just converted the repository and constructed a testing environment for our repository. This would give us an idea if it would work or not. And the preliminary tests suggest this would work. The waiting has begun for a fresh CVS tarball.

Yesterday I requested the sourceforge support staff to make a fresh tarball so that we can go forward with the conversion. Almost immediately they responded by providing us with the new tarball. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to download the file until a couple of hours ago.

I converted the repository on my local power mac. cvs2svn gave two errors:

1. ERROR: A CVS repository cannot contain both wicket/wicket/wicket.ipr,v and wicket/wicket/Attic/wicket.ipr,v
2. ERROR: The following symbols are tags in some files and branches in others.
   Use –force-tag, –force-branch and/or –exclude to resolve the symbols.
   ‘WICKET_1_1′ is a tag in 117 files, a branch in 1646 files and has commits in 91 files.

the first error was resolved by removing the file from the Attic. The second by forcing the branch.

cvs2svn --username=CVS2SVN --dump-only --force-branch=WICKET_1_1 wicket
... snip ...
cvs2svn Statistics:
------------------
Total CVS Files:              4951
Total CVS Revisions:         22762
Total Unique Tags:              92
Total Unique Branches:          10
CVS Repos Size in KB:       127077
Total SVN Commits:            4854
First Revision Date:    Tue Sep 21 17:10:53 2004
Last Revision Date:     Fri Mar 10 11:49:13 2006
------------------
Timings:
------------------
pass 1:    27 seconds
pass 2:     4 seconds
pass 3:     0 seconds
pass 4:     7 seconds
pass 5:    21 seconds
pass 6:     2 seconds
pass 7:     1 second
pass 8:   662 seconds
total:    728 seconds

I am uploading the repository as I write, and I’ll import the repository shortly.

The Wicket CVS repository is moving to SourceForge’s subversion service. We have had a rough time living on CVS and are hoping that this move will solve many of the connectivity problems our users are experiencing. We also hope that the window between a developer commit and the availability of the change for our users will be minimized.

Due to some problems with the daily backup of CVS, we haven’t been able to move our repository. Sourceforge staff was kind enough to supply us with a fresh tarball, which I’m currently converting to subversion.