[LLVMdev] Open Source Contributions (was Re: Benchmarks)

[Reid Spencer]

On Sun, 2004-05-02 at 08:26, Vikram S. Adve wrote:
> Reid,
> 
> There are no IP issues or restrictions I know of that prevent us from 
> accepting contributions or providing direct CVS write access to 
> non-UIUC people. 

That's good to know. When I originally asked for CVS write access (last
fall), the issue was raised that an account would have to be created on
a UIUC machine and that current policy does not permit that for non-UIUC
people. 

>  If we can solve the technical issues, Chris and I 
> would both be in favor of making write access available, in some 
> controlled way. 

Please note that it is possible with recent versions of CVS to provide
password protected access without creating a system account.  This
facility, pserver, is already set up, and is how anonymous CVS access
works now. All that needs to be done is to add some users to the
$CVSROOT/CVSROOT/passwd file. You may additionally need to set up a
separate real (Unix) user to control access. For example "anoncvs" and
"pubcvs" are common to provide read-only and read-write access to the
CVS repository, respectively.  

>  (As Chris said, I think it would be really unfortunate 
> if we had to fork off the CVS repository but again, inside or outside 
> the UIUC domain is a non-issue.)

The issues of forking LLVM code base and providing write access to CVS
are orthogonal. I fully agree that forking LLVM at this time would be
bad. Providing write access to the repository would be good. :)  
> 
> Replacing CVS with something else may be our only option, but I would 
> want to make sure that it is as widely available as CVS, so that 
> prospective users don't have to download and install version management 
> sofware to use llvm.

I wouldn't vote for replacing CVS at this time. Yes, its old and clunky
but it gets the job done and I'm sure you could live without the project
interruption right now. 

In my opinion, Subversion is well suited to open source development and
is "familiar" for CVS users. However, moving to Subversion at this time
would be premature. It is just recently at version 1.0 and needs a
little time (few months perhaps) to settle down and get the kinks out.

Perhaps it would be prudent to wait for summer before thinking about
switching version control systems. The impact will be less and
Subversion should be in better shape by then.  In the mean time,
providing write access to existing CVS server sounds doable both policy
wise and technically.

Reid.

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