Re: Trouble with rsync-access

[Christopher Faylor <cgf at alum dot bu dot edu>]

On Tue, Jun 01, 2004 at 05:52:58PM +0200, Volker Reichelt wrote:
>On  1 Jun, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
>> Volker Reichelt <reichelt@igpm.rwth-aachen.de> writes:
>> 
>>> since a couple of days rsync-access to the gcc sources doesn't
>>> work as it used to. Rsyncing my local archive and then checking
>>> out from there results in an error message:
>>> 
>>>   cvs checkout: Updating gcc
>>>   cvs [checkout aborted]: cannot stat /sourceware/cvs-lockdir/gcc:
>>>     No such file or directory
>>> 
>>> The culprit seems to be the line
>>> 
>>>   LockDir=/sourceware/cvs-lockdir/gcc
>>> 
>>> which got added to CVSROOT/config recently:
>>> 
>>>   date	2004.05.30.01.29.28;	author root;	state Exp;
>>> 
>>> After deleting this line manually, the check-out works fine.
>>> But that's only a work-around since the next rsync will break things again.
>>> 
>>> Can the change be reverted or be worked around in some other way?
>> 
>> We made that change intentionally.  I don't know that we have ever
>> promised that you can rsync our CVS repository and then use it
>> locally.  It's great if it works, but I don't think we're going to
>> accept responsibility for having it always work.
>
>Well, but it is desirable to make it work as rsync.html states:
>
>  In an ongoing effort to accelerate development of GCC and provide an open development
>  environment, we are offering our CVS repository and various other data through anonymous
>  rsync access.
>
>  That way you can make local copies of the GCC CVS repository to ease the burden on the
>  GCC main site, and browse the source locally using cvs.
>
>So, making rsync difficult to use seems to be counter-productive, since
>it puts more load on GCC's CVS.

Hmm.  That wording sort of presupposes that rsync uses less resources
than cvs.  I suspect that isn't true, i.e., it is not a one-to-one
rsync==good, cvs==bad situation.  For instance, if you are just using
rsync to download the repository for a couple of people to use, I
suspect that you are putting more load on the machine than you would be
if you were just using cvs.

One of the reasons for this CVSROOT/config change was to reduce the load
on cvs so, as Frank says, we are not going to revert the change unless
someone reports a serious problem.  Having to edit CVSROOT/config after
an rsync does not quality as a serious problem.

Note that savannah.gnu.org uses rsync to grab the gcc repositories and
cvs checkouts from savannah are apparently unaffected.

>Not everybody has write permissions outside his/her home directory :-(
>(I'll have to use a shell script that does the patching after the
>rsync.)

...or just exclude that one file when you are doing rsyncs.  That's
apparently what savannah does.

cgf