Re: GSoC intro

From: Ramkumar Ramachandra <artagnon@gmail.com>
Date: Mar 26, 2012, 11:06 UTC
Message-ID: <CALkWK0nW91PE2810qrZUbL0x-_YTTA_2tLFVhvXBJ2NFGvVxog@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <11105663.xsXc2sBkNH@flobuntu>

Hi Florian,

Florian Achleitner wrote:

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> On Wednesday 21 March 2012 00:19:41 David Barr wrote:
>> Much of the progress so far has been merged into master.
>> Still outstanding are some of Dmitry's patches:
>> remote-svn-alpha_v2 [1]
>> svn-fe-options_v7 [2]
>
> I tried to find svn-related parts in gits sources. I found:
>  - the huge ./git-svn.perl, which seems to be the git-svn implementation.
>  - ./contrib/svn-fe/ and ./vcs-svn/,
> those you pointed me at.
> Did I miss something?
> Is there any seperate source documentation? The source files I looked at
> contain only very few comments. And nothing about the big picture.

A lot of big-picture discussions can be found in mailing list archives. Let us know what you're looking for exactly.

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>> Yes, that's the plan. To be fair, it is a stretch goal. Two GSoC
>> students have brought us as far as a read-only remote helper. So I
>> think there's at least two summers' worth of work remaining.
>
> What is the remote helper? How can I use/try it?

The remote helper is an external program that git invokes to handle specific protocols. See ./git_remote_helpers for example.

>> [1] https://github.com/divanorama/git/tree/remote-svn-alpha_v2
> Is it in here? Should my project continue on this work?
> Until now, I've never used any remote that was not git.

You might also decide to build a brand new remote helper.

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>> A track record is a plus.
>
> If you like, I could provide more references, e.g. a university course project
> in C using git.
>
>> Some extra reading:
>> [...]
> Haven't yet read it.
>
> Hm, and there are still some general questions:
> What about git-svn? Whats wrong with it? (I haven't used it) I saw the huge
> perl script, this looks a little extreme ;). But it provides bi-directional
> access?!

The main problem with git-svn.perl is that it's hard to maintain or extend. See also: David Barr's LCA talk [1].

> svn-fe reads a dump of the svn repo. How can this approach ever be
> bidirectional? Probably I've to do the extra reading first ..

It can't. You'll have to write something to handle the Git -> SVN conversion. See also: one of my earlier attempts in this regard [2].

[1]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hVuv-wv4Dw [2]: https://github.com/artagnon/git/tree/svn-fi

Ram