Subject: Re: irc usage..

From: Donnie Berkholz <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 20 May 2006 15:18:10 -0700

Yann Dirson wrote:
> On Sat, May 20, 2006 at 10:26:22AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>> I'm reading the irc logs, and seeing that people have problems, but (a) it 
>> was while I was asleep and (b) irc use doesn't encourage people to 
>> actually explain what the problems _are_, so I have no clue.
>>
>> So now I know that "spyderous" has problems importing some 1GB gentoo CVS 
>> archive, but that's pretty much it. Grr.

Hi all,

I just subscribed and this post is the only one I've got from the
thread, so I'm responding to it instead of the original. Gentoo's an
IRC-based community, so I tend to try IRC first for any problems I have
and fall back to the list later if I can't get things figured out.

Here's a rough summary:

Our main repo is actually a bit over 2G (2103621223) now that I check,
but it's not very complex. There's actually just one branch, and I don't
think anyone would care if we lost the history from it because it's a
release branch from a few years ago.

Somebody else tried importing it with git-cvsimport, but he said he hit
some kind of problem and recalled that it was a cvsps segfault. Sounds
about right, since I've never gotten cvsps to run successfully on the
whole repo either.

I tried with parsecvs, but it runs into OOM even on a machine with 4G
RAM after reading in all the ,v files, presumably while it's building
some huge tree of changesets in memory. Keith Packard's suggested that
there are ways to reduce parsecvs's memory use, because it retains the
full tree in memory for each revision rather than just the files that
actually changed. But my C skills are pretty weak; I'm an OK reader but
not much of a writer yet.

Thanks,
Donnie