I'm trying to co the portage tree from the gentoo anonymous CVS as documented in the Portage Manual, but for some reason it is rejecting my attempt to login. FYI, I did it verbatim to what was printed in the manual. I'm no newbee when it comes to cvs, so I suspect my unique situation probably has something to do with it. The machine I'm trying to do this from has a valid ARPA ip address, but the address doesn't have a name assigned to it. So, obviously, any attempts to run reverse-dns lookup will fail. Is this a known issue, or has anonymous cvs access changed since the Manual was published? If not, then I guess this is a bug.
dont worry you can stop doubting yourself they closed anoncvs due to the # of people who used it ... it slowed down access for the official developers
I want to contribute, but asking me to remerge my changes *every* time I rsync is a little rediculous. I mean why not put a cvs mirror on sourceforge? They have plenty o' bandwidth... If that isn't ypour style, a suggestion might be to allow rsync checkouts of the entire cvs tree on the rsync mirrors, similar to the scheme used by openssl [http://www.openssl.org/source/repos.html]. That way, everyone is happy. Otherwise, how in the *#$% are we supposed to merge changes w/o hosing our modifications?
the answer to keeping your changes from being deleted can be found at Bug 4144 to merge your updates with Gentoo, right now you have to submit stuff as enhancements to bugs.gentoo.org
Well that does give a suggestion ebuilds that don't already exist, but it says nothing about already existing modifications. Yes I *know* you use the bug report system to submit ebuilds. My point wasn't in regards to submission, but rather in regards to keeping a local tree one can hack on without having it clobbered. AFAICT, 4144 only works for non pre-existing ebuilds. But if the ebuild exists in the main tree, does the overlay ebuild override it? Anyhow, more to the point, I still don't understand why you banned the anoncvs in the first place. I mean you *can* put a limit on how many simultaneous logins a particular account can have. You can even put limits on a particular account based on load averages. Assuming the server isn't a pentium/100, it can easily handle many concurrent seesions by developers in addition to 2-3max sessions by anon. So I don't see why you don't just do either of the previous suggestions for the anonymous account. That way the developers are happy and so are the non-official developers.
well i guess you havent looked into PORTAGE_OVERLAY too much it does allow you to replace existing ebuilds in a local dir my example, i hacked on ghostscript, so i did: PORTAGE_OVERLAY=/usr/local/portage put a version of ghostscript into /usr/local/portage/app-text/ghostscript `emerge ghostscript` installs my version basically emerge scans your local dir for packages before looking at the default also, people have been using bugs.gentoo.org for submitting updates/patches ... thats what i meant in my last comment, not JUST for new ebuilds :P the reason for the lock out is developers couldnt develop on it, as for a 'better' solution of allowing 2/3 simul logins, i guess noone really thought about it. now they will
*** Bug 6834 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
You could setup another server that mirrors the cvs server and acts as an anonymous cvs server only. It could check out hourly the main tree. This way the actual cvs server for developers would have very little load (except during the entire tree checkout), but that could be decreased as well because it grabs the files just like regular cvs checkouts. Maybe cvs mirrors (only for anonymous checkouts of course) could be setup. This would solve the problem. I guess my only question is what do we do now? The PORTAGE_OVERLAY sounds interesting. I thing all the documentation on gentoo.org web site should change to reflect this. It probably should have been done before turning it off. You guys are probably pretty busy though.
I agree with the previous person on most of his arguments. PORTAGE OVERLAY is not the solution though, because it still requires the annoyance of manually merging changes. This is why CVS was invented, to make things easier for everyone, especially those who were trying to keep local modifications. Unless you read every single digest of the cvs log each day, how will you notice what changed. The simple fact of the matter is that there is a free (as in beer and as in speech) solution. Sourceforge provides cvs repositories for just about any project. I don't see why you couldn't: A)Move the cvs repository to sourceforge and point the cvs.gentoo.org at it. -or- B)Mirror the cvstree to sourceforge on a quater-hourly basis using cvsup or rsync. Sourceforge allows all the scripting capabilities you currently use to maintain your cvs tree. It has cvsweb as well, providing the same interface you do. To me, this makes sense and would have the added benefit of reducing the load on the gentoo server [which I assume hosts your website as well]. Mike Cummings told me the reason why the website was down for 2 hours this weekend was because of hardware failure. In light of this, the first solution seems like the best bet. Does anyone have an ax to grind with sourceforge is my question? If it's there, why not use it?
I have updated the portage manual to reflect this - //ZhEN
