Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Andrew Johnson <[email protected]> · Thu, 6 May 2010 13:41:22 -0500

> > I would definitely prefer that. I could be persuaded to switch to another
> > distributed VCS like Bazaar or Mercurial (or even Git), but would rather
> > not have to work with Subversion. I hope you understand ;-)
> >
> > Lewis Muir suggested public hosting at Launchpad, like EPICS base. He has
> > a point. (This would mean Bazaar. Not my preferred choice, but as I said
> > I could be convinced if this makes it noticeably easier for others to
> > contribute.)
>
> I would think SourceForge is the more appropriate place.

If you pick SourceForge, neither Janet nor I will be able to commit changes to 
it directly, which will mean extra work for you whenever we come up with any 
minor modifications due to changes in the Base API or build rules.  The fact 
that we're not supposed to create a SF account is a pain I agree, and it may 
apply to several other of the public hosting sites too, but it doesn't to 
Launchpad.

> > In any case, I am willing to convert the svn repo and rebase (actually
> > re-record) the changes I made. So we will have the complete history in
> > one repo.

Since I had already converted Base and have all the tools installed, I have 
converted the svn repo to Bazaar and uploaded it to lp:~anj/+junk/sequencer 
which is the Bazaar URL, or https://code.launchpad.net/~anj/+junk/sequencer to 
view the branch details in a web browser.  The svn-dump file is 2.6MB 
compressed; I can make that or a fast-import file available to you if you 
would prefer to work on it yourself.  I would also be very happy to help you 
set up a Launchpad project if you want to go that way (which would be my 
preference).

> > Apropos: Some of the source files still contain changelog style header
> > comments and an ancient LANL copyright notice. I would like to get rid of
> > both: the changelog clutters the source code with information that is
> > completely out-dated, irrelevant when trying to understand the code, and
> > you can always look up who made what changes in the VCS. It also gives
> > false positives when grep'ing for program phrases. Copyright stuff should
> > rather go to a separate LICENSE file. However, I hesitate to delete any
> > of this stuff out of respect for the original authors and also due to
> > concerns about legal issues.
> >
> > Do you have a recommendation?

I would second Ralph's response, the copyright _notices_ do have to appear in 
the individual source files, but they can refer to a separate LICENSE file 
containing the actual license terms.  If you look at almost any source file in 
Base you'll see the model and wording that I would recommend you follow, but 
obviously you'll have to adjust the actual copyright notice part (institution 
and year) according to what's in the original files.  You should not change 
the copyright year for any institution other than your own when you modify a 
file.

Unfortunately the repository history only goes back to the point where William 
Lupton unbundled the sequencer in about 2000, so most history logs in the 
files probably do not have duplicates in the repository, although I wouldn't 
be too bothered if you decided to remove them.

Ralph said:
> I would strongly suggest to move it onto an external public hosting
> service - and get rid of the system administration overhead of
> maintaining and securing such a bunch of (public!) services, which is
> usually no fun, just a lot of work and pain.

There are a grand total of 3 bug reports in the Trac history which you can see 
at https://svn.aps.anl.gov/trac/epics/sncseq/report/6  If Ben wants to 
continue to use Trac for bug reporting and wiki pages that would be fine by 
me, but it's completely up to him.  Of course that doesn't provide the 
revision browser though.

Personally I really like the way in which Launchpad integrates with Bazaar 
without having to do any setup.  I commited a change in Bazaar the other day 
giving the option --fixes=lp:<bugno> and overnight Launchpad automatically 
attached a reference from the bug to the commit branch.

- Andrew
-- 
The best FOSS code is written to be read by other humans -- Harald Welte

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System