[Openmcl-devel] Building CVS sources from scratch

[Sven Van Caekenberghe]

I just thought that open source software should always be able to be 
compiled from sources, and openmcl 0.13 certainly did (compiling its 
own sources using itself). The next idea was to check out the sources 
>from the cvs repository to see what new stuff was there (bugfixes would 
interest me mostly I guess).

I think that most other open source projects support the main branch 
(head) of their cvs repositories being checked out and built: this will 
get you 'unreleased' software of course, the build might fail and the 
resulting software might crash but normally things should go well.

If special, highly experimental or dangerous changes are made, you 
should either keep them local or start a branch and commit your changes 
to it. Later, you can merge that branch in the main one. In theory, you 
should have automatic tests (like the ansi suite or compiling yourself) 
that have to succeed before commits to the main branch are allowed.

Now the fact that you have a circular relation between the boot and 
full image complicates things (gcc might have the same problem, no ?).

You can of course do very complex things with cvs (cfr. the mozilla 
project, or jboss, and may others) but in the end you will shoot 
yourself in the foot. We use cvs with occasional branches and unit 
testing to good result.

On Friday, September 6, 2002, at 12:07 PM, Gary Byers wrote:

> You're a brave man.
>
> I should probably do something to fix this (using CVS branch tags, or
> something.)  The main CVS branch is an arbitrary mixture of bug fixes
> to the previous release and development code that's intended for the
> next release.  Sometimes, the development code compiles cleanly with
> the previous release binaries; other times (as now) there are lots
> of bootstrapping issues.
>
> <http://openmcl.clozure.com/Doc/cvsinfo.html> briefly mentions the
> notion of checking out tagged revisions (e.g., "cvs get -r 
> Version_0_13 ..."),
> but doesn't really explain why one would want to do so.  (And CVS "-r"
> tags are often "sticky" when one doesn't want them to be.)
>
> Right now, it'd be more useful if people people doing a CVS checkout or
> update got 0.13 (or 0.13+bugfixes) by default, and only got the 
> bleeding-
> edge pre-0.14 stuff if they really wanted it.  (I believe that I'm 
> talking
> about the distinction between the HEAD and MAIN CVS branches, but I 
> know
> just enough about CVS administration to be dangerous.)
>
> I will RTF CVS Manual and try to straighten this out.  The problem's
> a little more severe now than it has been in the past, but things 
> really
> should be set up a little differently.
>
--
Sven Van Caekenberghe - mailto:sven at beta9.be
Beta Nine - software engineering - http://www.beta9.be
.Mac - svc at mac.com - http://homepage.mac.com/svc


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