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spicerun
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Sourceforge's Code Repository System?

Post by spicerun »

Hi,

I've noticed in the past couple of months that the CVS system on Sourceforge seems to be 'decomposing'.... Last night I was trying it and found I couldn't access it by developer access on any of my projects, and that anoymous access is very slow. I've also noticed that the CVS Browsing function has not updated for almost a couple of months. Has anyone else noticed this? I thought sourceforge.net was going to keep CVS operating alongside Subversion, but this doesn't appear to be the case?

At any rate, I've converted all of my OSS projects to the Subversion Repository System and glad to report everything is working there very well, as far as I can tell. My only regret is that I wasn't able to keep all of the old branches and any of the tags from CVS, and I was very disappointed that the cvs2svn python script could not convert files checked in by older CVS versions to Subversion (at least as I observed...I had some text Makefiles from 2000 that this script kept erroring and crashing on).

I was just wondering if this was just me, or if any of you other guys hosting projects on Sourceforge.net have also seen these problems with Sourceforge's CVS?
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Post by protocol »

I haven't tried in a while. But I will try this weekend. Thanks for the heads up. Have you contacted SourceForge admins about this issue?
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Post by tierra »

Being that Enlightenment is always still in heavy development, most everything is done from CVS on SF.net. Anonymous CVS was always as much as 24 hours behind on commits to the actual development CVS server, and would fail updating all the time. SourceForge has had constant problems with their CVS servers for a long time now, and I have heard it's recently gotten worse even on the development CVS servers and not just the anonymous access servers. Enlightenment eventually put up a separate anonymous CVS mirror hosted elsewhere, updated much more frequently, with faster access, and much more reliable.

Lucky for wxWidgets, CVS is hosted on Dotsrc (formerly SunSITE) which has done a much better job maintaining the server (though it is still somewhat slow, but to be expected on a big repository like wxWidgets, it would be unbearable on SF).

Unfortunately, the website, documentation, and wiki are all hosted on SourceForge, and like the problems with the SF CVS servers, have had problems themselves. The site went down for a good chunk of a day about a week ago I think. The database that the wiki relies on went down for a while right around the deadline for Google Summer of Code student applications which is being kept track of mostly on the wiki currently this week. SourceForge has never been very reliable hosting, though it is free hosting.
spicerun
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Post by spicerun »

protocol wrote:I haven't tried in a while. But I will try this weekend. Thanks for the heads up. Have you contacted SourceForge admins about this issue?
Sourceforge's Support Tracker is full of CVS not working complaints for the past 2 months, none of them addressed except by the autoreply system when the ticket was submitted. They'd have to be blind to not know they have an issue.
tierra wrote:Unfortunately, the website, documentation, and wiki are all hosted on SourceForge, and like the problems with the SF CVS servers, have had problems themselves. The site went down for a good chunk of a day about a week ago I think. The database that the wiki relies on went down for a while right around the deadline for Google Summer of Code student applications which is being kept track of mostly on the wiki currently this week. SourceForge has never been very reliable hosting, though it is free hosting.
Well, CVS seems to be giving them the most problems. I just don't know if it is intentional or not. But I can say that Subversion is working wonderfully...Changes made to the Subversion repository (including the repository browsing) appear immediately right now. I was just now looking at other projects (like gaim) hosted on sourceforge and I notice that they have already converted to Subversion as well. I'm just not as pleased with Subversion, as I was with CVS.
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Sourceforge Explains ...

Post by spicerun »

Just Received tonight from Sourceforge.net (I hope this is not breaking forum rules):

Code: Select all

Greetings,

You are receiving this mail because you are a project admin for
a SourceForge.net-hosted project. One of our primary services,
CVS, suffered a series of interrelated, critical hardware failures
in recent weeks. We understand how frustrating this CVS outage
must be to you and your users; however, our top priority remains
preservation of the integrity of your data.

The series of CVS hardware failures prompted us to expedite the
deployment of planed improvements to our CVS infrastructure,
drawing upon much of the knowledge that we gained from our
Subversion deployment. Our improved CVS service architecture,
which we plan to deploy tomorrow afternoon (2006-05-12), will
offer greater performance and stability and will eliminate several
single points of failure.

The Site Status page (https://www.sf.net/docs/A04) will be
updated as soon as the new infrastructure is rolled out. In the
interim, please read the important information provided below
to learn about how these changes will affect your project.


Summary of changes, effective 2006-05-12:


1. Hostname for CVS service

Old: cvs.sourceforge.net

New: PROJECT_UNIX_NAME.cvs.sourceforge.net

This change will require new working copies to be checked out of all
repositories (so control files in the working copy will point to the
right place). We will be updating the instructions we supply, but
instructions that your team has written within documentation, etc. will
need to be updated.

cvs -d:pserver:[email protected]:/cvsroot/gaim co gaim

would be changed to

cvs -d:pserver:[email protected]:/cvsroot/gaim co gaim



2. ViewCVS

We are moving from ViewCVS to its successor, ViewVC. ViewVC is
currently in use for our Subversion service.



3. Sync delay

Old: CVS pserver, tarballs and ViewCVS provided against a separate
server which is a minimum of three hours behind developer CVS.

New: ViewVC will be provided against developer CVS (it will be current).
CVS pserver will be provided against a secondary server (not developer
server) with a maximum expected delay of two hours.

Follow-up work is planned (this infrastructure takes us 80% of the way)
to essentially eliminate the sync delay.



4. Read-only rsync service

As a new service offering, we are now providing read-only rsync access
against developer CVS. This allows projects to efficiently make
on-demand backups of their entire CVS repository.

All projects should be making regular backups of their CVS repository
contents using this service.



5. Nightly tarball service

Nightly tarball service is being dropped in lieu of read-only rsync
service. Projects which currently depend on nightly tarballs for
repository backups will need to begin using rsync to make a backup copy
of their repository contents.

We see this as a major functional improvement. For a number of reasons,
tarballs have fallen out of sync with the data in the repository at
times in the past few years. Tarballs required a substantial amount of
additional disk, and I/O to generate. The move to read-only rsync
allows backups to be produced on-demand, with an update frequency chosen
by the project.



6. Points of failure

In the past, developer CVS service for all projects was provided from a
single host. CVS pserver service was provided from individual backend
heads based on a split of the data.

Under our new design, developer CVS and most of our CVS-related services
are provided from one of ten CVS hosts (count subject to increase with
growth). Each host is independent, and makes a backup copy of the
repository data of another host (which is used to provide the pserver
CVS service).

Failure of a single host will impact only the availability of data on
that host. Since the data is split among a larger number of hosts, the
size of data impacted by an individual host outage is substantially
smaller, and the time required for us to restore service will be
substantially shorter.

This rapid architecture change has been made possible specifically using
the research we performed for our recent launch of Subversion service.
We've applied our best practices, produced a substantial amount of
internal documentation, and kept an eye toward maintainability.
This effort has allowed us to deploy this new architecture quickly
once hardware was received, and will permit us to quickly scale
this service horizontally as growth and demand requires. 



Many other minor improvements have also been made to improve the service
offering and make it less trouble-prone. The most important of which are
listed above. For a full description of the new service offering, and
for information on how to use the services described above, please refer
to the site documentation for the CVS service after the service has been
launched: https://www.sf.net/docs/E04


Thank you,

The SourceForge.net Team
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Post by protocol »

Yeah, I was just about to post that. I suppose it should be working better than ever now. I'll see this weekend.
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