Re: [BK] cvs export

Stelian Pop
2005-03-02T11:00:52Z

On Tue, Mar 01, 2005 at 05:14:19PM -0800, Larry McVoy wrote:

> A while back someone complained about the CVS exporter because it
> sometimes groups a pile of BK changesets into one commit. That's true,
> it does.

I guess that this someone was me...

> I've been running tests over the BK tree and I think we can do better.
> Here's the scoop: when we do an export we are going from a very bushy
> graph structure to a linear graph structure. The BK graph structure
> represents what happened in all the BK repos that ever came together,
> the CVS graph structure is more like what would happen if all the work had
> been done in CVS. What that means in practice is that the linearization
> sometimes results in a single CVS commit which has multiple changesets
> in it. Pavel or someone complained that the problem with that is that
> if you are looking for a bug and you are searching through commits, that
> works fine *unless* your bug happens to be in one of the commits which
> is really a pile of changesets. Is that accurate Pavel/Andrea/Roman/etc?

yes.

> In the last flamefest about BK there was all this fuss that there wasn't
> enough info in the CVS export and I think that the problem described
> above is the basis for 99% (or maybe 100%) of the flameage. Is that
> also accurate?

yes.

> I tried to point out the following and think it was lost in the noise:
> while the repository commits themselves construct a very bushy graph,
> the files are not at all bushy, they are extremely linear. So what does
> that actually mean? The history of the repository is very parallel,
> that's what creates a bushy revision history graph, but in spite of that,
> there is very little parallelism in the actual files. The result of
> that is that when we do the CVS export, it is true that the number of
> commits is about half the number of BK commits. But the number of file
> deltas is only 4% less than the number of file deltas in BK.

correct.

The exact numbers are maybe not entirely correct (depends on how exactly
you measure the thing), but the big picture is exactly that: 50% of the
changeset (boundary) information is lost, but only about 4% of the
file deltas are lost.

Those are evolving numbers, and if more and more developers use BK
the loss could increase exponentially. But this remain to be seen.

> Pavel/Andrea/Roman/etc still were unhappy and they are justified in being
> unhappy because even though we have almost all of the file history what
> we don't have is all of the patch boundaries. And when you are hunting
> down a bug, if you look at Documentation/BUG-HUNTING (which I wrote back
> in 1996 amusingly enough) the idea is to do binary search over a range
> of changes in order to narrow down the cause.

> Which leads us back to the problem. If you narrow things down but where
> you land is one of the clustered commits which has many changesets in it
> then you are stuck with having to wade through a big pile of diffs to
> find the bug, those diffs consisting of multiple patches. Sound right
> to you Pavel/Andrea/Roman/etc?

right.

> If so, I have to agree with you, this is a limitation of the CVS exporter.
> So I've been thinking about how to fix this and have the following idea.
> I want all the CVS export users to pay close attention because this either
> should make you happy or not and I want to know the answer.
>
> When we do the export we do a couple of things to make things pleasant
> for you. We make sure that the timestamps on all the files in the
> same commit are the same, that makes timestamp based tools work.
> We also shove a comment into each file's history that looks like so:
> (Logical change 1.12345) so that tools that try and group things based
> on comments can work.
>
> It's that second feature that I think we can use to solve the problem,
> we're finally getting to the idea. If we have a commit that is really 200
> patches which touch 400 files then we can do better. Suppose that the
> files in the patches are disjoint, i.e., each patch touches a different
> set of files, there is no overlap. If that's true then we could change
> the comment to (Logical change 1.12345.$PATCH). It's still all one CVS
> commit but if you need to go working through that commit to get at the
> individual patches you could, right?

yes.

BTW, in my latest BKCVS->SVN howto I enhanced the conversion tool to
do just that by looking at the file delta checkin messages and assume
that those messages are consistent per BK commit.

Your proposal would not bring much extra (meta)data to what is already
present but would considerably simplify the conversion process
and make it less error-prone.

> One problem is that the set of files in patches may not be disjoint,
> the same file may participate in multiple patches. I think we can handle
> that in the following way, we put multiple comments, one for each patch,
> so you'd see
>
> (Logical change 1.12345.5)
> (Logical change 1.12345.11)
> (Logical change 1.12345.79)
>
> That's not a perfect answer because now that file participates in
> multiple patches and if it's the one that has the problem you'll have
> to wade through the diffs for that file for that commit. But that's an
> extreme corner case as far as I can tell (I have faith I'll be "educated"
> if I'm wrong about that).

It can be a corner case for some, but it will be important for others.
It depends much on the 'location' of the file being changed and the
number of stacking BK maintainers modifying this file.

Would there be a possibility to find the real patch given its
Logical change tag ?

I know that the patch is in bk-commit-head, but there is no way to
link 1.12345.79 to one of the mails there. Maybe bkbits could give
the information ?

> So, everyone including the Pavel/Andrea/Roman/etc camp, how do you feel
> about this? If we were to hack the exporter to add this info do you think
> that would address the problems you have with the exporter? The reason
> I ask is that while I was going to just hack this in, I went to do that
> and it turned into a nasty problem, both engineering and CPU wise when
> exporting. So if this isn't what you wanted then I won't bother to do it.
>
> I'm not asking if this is the same as GPLing BK or giving people free
> access to 100% of the BK internal data structures, etc. What I'm asking
> is if this will make the CVS export tree something you can use to get your
> job done in an efficient way.

Your proposal adds more information to the CVS export tree and this
is good.

But as far as I can tell it still doesn't let the user find the original
patch for a change (unless you can use the extended logical change
information to access the patch somewhere else which would be
acceptable to me).

Stelian.
--
Stelian Pop <stelian@popies.net>