Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Andrew Johnson <[email protected]> · Fri, 18 Dec 2009 16:12:25 -0600

I will be converting the epics/base part of the EPICS repository to the Bazaar 
DVCS next Wednesday (12/23), and will then push the resultant branches to the 
Launchpad (lp) hosting site.  Please ensure that you have committed everything 
from your CVS working directories before you leave work on Tuesday, or be 
prepared to do some work getting your changes back into the tree after the 
conversion, which might not be complete until several days into the new year.

I have already created the project and a couple of associated teams at 
Launchpad; see https://launchpad.net/epics-base to start with.  There is a 
Blueprint attached to the project to cover the migration process, which links 
to a page on our wiki for more detail.  There's a link on that wiki page to 
another one I'm working on which describes how to work with Bazaar.  The 
examples won't work until I push the converted branches up to Launchpad 
though.

While you're waiting, feel free to take the Launchpad tour and to create an 
account there, then join the EPICS team (which is really just a collection 
point at this stage).  The EPICS Core Developers team (epics-core) will be 
used to control write access to the official release branches and will have a 
restricted membership, but anyone can publish their own branches of the 
project without needing to belong to it so I don't expect the epics-core team 
to grow very large.

Jeff: I intend to extract all the commits you have made to the CVS main trunk 
since September 3rd and put them on a separate branch.  I'm afraid that until 
you've actually finished development and thoroughly tested your new code it 
will block other development work on the trunk which could be released as 
R3.15.x sooner.  [As an aside, have you been keeping your recent changes in a 
separate VCS locally?  The fact that some of your CVS log messages have been 
just "sync" do rather imply that.  I don't know if we'd be able to merge those 
changes instead when we get to that point, although I imagine the log messages 
are probably better though.]

For examples of the "other work" I'm talking about, the code to do CA over TCP 
has been languishing in CVS on the trunk since the first Codeathon, and I also 
have some patches that Marty developed to allow the database to support 
Process-Get, which I felt were too major for R3.14 but which should be merged 
before they go stale.

Bazaar makes merging branches easy to do, and I want to change the way we work 
so that we develop new features on a branch which can be published, tested and 
reviewed before merging them into their targeted branch/branches.  I will 
probably use Marty's Process-Get changes as my first example using this 
approach, publishing a branch containing them for comment sometime after the 
migration is complete.

- Andrew

PS: I know we originally said we would use Mercurial, but I was unable to find 
a public Hg hosting site that Argonne would let me use ("indemnify" is a very 
scary word for our lawyers).  I also really like the features that Launchpad 
provides, and it only supports Bazaar.
-- 
The best FOSS code is written to be read by other humans -- Harald Welte

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System