Still on CVS?

Thursday, December 16. 2010

I was under the impression that Postgres was one of the last major FOSS projects using CVS before we switched to using git. Certainly that's what Josh Berkus said in a recent article. But today I found here that both MinGW and Cywin, both fairly substantial projects, are still using CVS. So I wonder how many others there are, and if they are considering moving.

On a related note, the WIndows git installation is amazingly big. It's about 172Mb of stuff. By contrast, an entire Mingw/Msys suite sufficient to build Postgres takes less than 1Gb. I know disk space is cheap, but there's no reason to be totally profligate with it. We've seen a few cases recently where buildfarm runs have encountered out of space conditions, and I'm looking at ways to have the client clean up more as it goes.

Posted by Andrew Dunstan in PostgreSQL at 06:03 | Comments (9) | Trackbacks (0)

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Hmm so less than 1 GB is smaller than 172 MB or am I reading that wrong. I suppose it could be but how much?

#1 Regina (Homepage) on 2010-12-16 07:17 (Reply)

I didn't say that it was smaller, did I? But a complete build environment would be expected to be much much larger than a single piece of SCM software.If you want me to compare like with like, let me point out that the installation size for TortoiseSVN on the same Windows machine took 17.2 Mb, 10% of what msysGit took.

#1.1 Andrew Dunstan on 2010-12-16 07:28 (Reply)

Andrew, 
 
I wasn't sure how to interpret this phrase you have - left me scratching my head is all. 
 
"Windows git installation is amazingly big. It's about 172Mb of stuff. By contrast, an entire Mingw/Msys suite sufficient to build Postgres takes less than 1Gb." 
 
172 MB vs. less than 1 GB I find kind of hard to compare. They are both less than 1 GB -- so what exactly does that mean.

#1.1.1 Regina (Homepage) on 2010-12-16 10:01 (Reply)

Consider if I were to say "His closet is 1000 square feet, but my whole house is less than 2000 square feet." This is a perfectly reasonable thing to say, and by analogy it's what I said about msysGit's uneconomical use of disk space.

#1.1.1.1 Andrew Dunstan on 2010-12-16 13:17 (Reply)

Andrew, 
 
Okay a good nights of sleep has cleared my mind a bit. I guess what I was looking for in my foggy state was the difference between compiling PostgreSQL with just the source or CVS vs. using GIT. I presume your 179 MB is just for git installation? and doesn't include the PostgreSQL gitted source? My recollation was that untarring the source of PostgreSQL takes up about 120 MB and was expecting both GIT and CVS to add to that number so 179 MB was looking pretty good to me <img src="/andrew/templates/default/img/emoticons/smile.png" alt=":-)" style="display: inline; vertical-align: bottom;" class="emoticon" /> 
 
I see what you are trying to say now that the git install is 30% of the old setup you needed which doesn't include any PostgreSQL source?

#1.1.1.1.1 Regina (Homepage) on 2010-12-16 15:23 (Reply)

The 172Mb is just for the software git installs, without having any repositories at all. 
 
A git clone of postgres is sadly quite big. In my development setup I have one mirror of the postgres repo and then multiple local clones of that. On Unix, local git clones use hard links to the original, so that helps tame the space blowout. See the extensive recent discussions on the hackers mailing list about best git work practices.

#1.1.1.1.1.1 Andrew Dunstan on 2010-12-16 16:06 (Reply)

Oh didn't see that last part so we are comparing MsysGIT with CVS under MingW. Didn't even know MingW/MSys came prepackaged with CVS. I thought you had to download that separately. I'm curious what percentage of space that is. 
 
So you know off hand how much space TortoiseGit takes up? Sorry for my gitlessness.

#1.1.1.1.2 Regina (Homepage) on 2010-12-16 15:35 (Reply)

TortoiseGit requires that you first install msysGit, so it's not an alternative but an addon. 
 
CVS is part of a standard Msys install. It's a single binary of about 800K. 
 
Part of the trouble with msysGit is that it installs its own substantial Msys setup, including bash, perl, tcl, vim, gawk and a whole bunch of other stuff, even if you already have Msys installed.

#1.1.1.1.2.1 Andrew Dunstan on 2010-12-16 16:14 (Reply)

Several of the BSDs are still on CVS. In fact, OpenBSD is investing heavily in a BSD-licensed replacement for CVS with their OpenCVS project. 
 
DragonFlyBSD recently switched to Git and FreeBSD switched to svn but still maintain a CVS and Perforce(WTF?) mirror. 
 
The NetBSD folks are lazily looking around for something else, but there are no serious efforts from the core team to switch. There have been some small community initiatives into importing the tree into git and, more recently, into Fossil. 
 
Packages for the pkgsrc package manager are also kept in CVS. Both NetBSD and DragonFlyBSD use it as their native package system. Dragonfly keeps a git mirror of pkgsrc around, but AFAIK commits still go straight into CVS. 
 
The smaller BSDs like MirOS (nee MirBSD), MidnightBSD and Freesbie are still using CVS as well. PC-BSD and Desktop BSD have switched to svn along with FreeBSD. 
 
The Drupal CMS and all its related modules is also still on CVS, but they're busy migrating to Git.

#2 Peter (Homepage) on 2010-12-16 12:23 (Reply)

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