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Aircraft are now hosted on SVN

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Aircraft are now hosted on SVN

Postby F-JJTH » Sat Sep 13, 2014 6:42 pm

Hi all,

This post is mostly interesting for people using the GIT repository: FGDATA ( https://gitorious.org/fg/fgdata/ )

Some months ago we decided to host our aircraft on an SVN repository in order to relieve the fgdata.
The fgdata repo would be a mirror of the base package.

Since some hours (and after a lot of work) we finally moved all our aircraft in the new SVN repo: http://sourceforge.net/p/flightgear/fgaddon/
This repository is named "FGAddon" because its content is not required to run FlightGear, a file not required but providing a new feature (in this case it's aircraft) is usually called an "addon".
On user-side, the most important feature is to be able to checkout only wanted aircraft, you do no longer need to download the +400 aircraft at once.
On developper-side, the most important interest is to have a base-package like which is lighter to sync for new contributors and easier to maintain when realease is built.


A mini HowTo:
* For Windows: install TortoiseSVN (http://tortoisesvn.net/)
* For Linux/Mac: install SVN

Then to pick an aircraft (in this example we pick up the DR400-dauphin):
Code: Select all
svn co https://svn.code.sf.net/p/flightgear/fgaddon/trunk/Aircraft/DR400-dauphin


Then you can regularly pick the last update with
Code: Select all
svn up


If you used to use GIT it's finally not so different to run "git clone" or "git pull" ;-)


PS: for our aircraft developer who usually don't read the mailing list (I hope it doesn't exist but just in case), please read this topic: https://sourceforge.net/p/flightgear/ma ... sg32809711

Kind regards,
Clément
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Re: Aircraft are now hosted on SVN

Postby sanhozay » Sun Sep 14, 2014 8:07 am

Three questions, if I may:

1. What happens to our local aircraft directory if we run 'git pull' on fgdata?

Should it be moved somewhere, refreshed from SVN? Something else?

(Probably no difference yet -- see Q3, but what will happen when aircraft are gone?)

2. What is the procedure for submitting aircraft changes?

http://wiki.flightgear.org/FlightGear_G ... developers

3. If the aircraft have moved, why do they still appear on Gitorious under the link you provided to fgdata?

https://gitorious.org/fg/fgdata/source/ ... b:Aircraft
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Re: Aircraft are now hosted on SVN

Postby F-JJTH » Sun Sep 14, 2014 9:17 am

Hi,

1. until December 17th nothing will be changed on fgdata.
2. You can use the Tickets system then attach the `svn diff` https://sourceforge.net/p/flightgear/tickets/
However, over the years it appeared that contacting the author of the model by mail was much more effective than create a merge request on gitorious
3. see answer 1. also you can read the discussion on the mailing list (link posted at the end of my first post)

Regards,
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Re: Aircraft are now hosted on SVN

Postby PH-JAKE » Thu Sep 18, 2014 9:39 am

Please amend the Flightgear Hangars wiki page, which now refers to gitorious fg/fgdata/Aircraft as the official hangar.
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Re: Aircraft are now hosted on SVN

Postby Johan G » Thu Sep 18, 2014 4:57 pm

PH-JAKE wrote in Thu Sep 18, 2014 9:39 am:Please amend the Flightgear Hangars wiki page.

Done (diff)
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Re: Aircraft are now hosted on SVN

Postby onox » Tue Sep 23, 2014 11:07 pm

Why has SVN become upstream? Why not git as upstream (fgaircraft) and SVN acting as a mirror? Git is much better than SVN as Linus explains here :mrgreen: (although personally I prefer mercurial :))
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Re: Aircraft are now hosted on SVN

Postby Hooray » Wed Sep 24, 2014 8:03 am

there's roughly ~100 hrs worth of discusssions to be found about that in the archvies, and even a dedicated wiki article providing a summary.
The meat of it is that git is generally not as good for binary data, and fgdata is primarily binary data (textures, audio etc) - also, finding free hosting given the size of the repo is a challenge.
Please don't send support requests by PM, instead post your questions on the forum so that all users can contribute and benefit
Thanks & all the best,
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Re: Aircraft are now hosted on SVN

Postby Johan G » Fri Nov 14, 2014 10:15 pm

Will the development history for all aircraft be lost permanently when the aircraft get removed from the Gitorious repository? In essence have also the the history been migrated? Would it even be (technically) possible?

Just curious. ;)
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Re: Aircraft are now hosted on SVN

Postby macnab » Tue Dec 02, 2014 2:09 pm

B1900d not there.
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Re: Aircraft are now hosted on SVN

Postby Hooray » Tue Dec 02, 2014 4:47 pm

yeah, retaining the history would be possible, even though it can be pretty involved at time (remember the cvs->git migration).
But basically git can talk pretty much any SCM protocol and can also export its own history.
The only question is if people are going to be sufficiently motivated to actually do this - we do have a number of $FG_AIRCRAFT commits also touching other parts of the base package, so this would require some heuristics to detect.
But it's definitely possible - however, the main people whose "git fu" is up to the task, do not currently seem to be actively involved.
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Re: Aircraft are now hosted on SVN

Postby F-JJTH » Tue Dec 02, 2014 6:04 pm

macnab wrote in Tue Dec 02, 2014 2:09 pm:B1900d not there.


The answer is in the first post:

F-JJTH wrote in Sat Sep 13, 2014 6:42 pm:The fgdata repo would be a mirror of the base package.


The B1900d is part of the base package, that's why he is still in the fgdata repository instead of being moved to the fgaddon repository.

For those who are not aware of "which files are part of the base package" you can look at this file: https://gitorious.org/fg/fgmeta/source/ ... kage.rules


Regards,
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Re: Aircraft are now hosted on SVN

Postby IAHM-COL » Tue Feb 03, 2015 5:41 pm

Legitimate cry

:shock: ;(

WHY!?

Nevermind, you guys are the core-devs and all.. but this move is so anti-intuitive!
I am almost subversive against subversion!

Good Point: I am not a developer of any kind so I should not care
Bad Point: I am one of hopefully not few that actually did fetch my aircrafts from the fgdata in gitorious. This move is a serious step back. And this is where I am going to: Regardless of your moves as the core developers (pointless or not!), why would you try so hard to hurt the "end user"?!

Question mark: Are nt you guys any willing to maintain a git repo available any way, and sync it with whatever SVN thing an SVN lover in the high spheres of FG control chooses to?
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Re: Aircraft are now hosted on SVN

Postby Johan G » Tue Feb 03, 2015 6:15 pm

I understand your frustration, but there are three big reasons behind doing this move, both detailed (deep) within the developer mailing list thread linked to in the first post:

  1. In Git a user wanting one aircraft from the fgdata repository would have to clone the entire repository, creating huge traffic.
  2. FlightGear already has a big enough repositories and traffic to cause friction with Gitorious.
  3. When SourceForge was asked about the possibility to move the larger parts of fgdata there, they gave a reassuring and positive answer.
Additionally, in contrast with Git, SVN is much better suited for centralized repositories from which one would normally only need a subdirectory at a time.
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Re: Aircraft are now hosted on SVN

Postby AndersG » Tue Feb 03, 2015 8:08 pm

Fortunately there is the git-svn extension to git that can be used to access a SVN repository (or any subdir of it) as a git repository.
However, if you don't intend to develop (i.e. just get the aircraft to fly them) it might not be worth the effort. OTOH, the development repository (git or SVN) shouldn't be seen as a distribution mechanism anyway.
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Re: Aircraft are now hosted on SVN

Postby sanhozay » Tue Feb 03, 2015 8:21 pm

Johan G wrote in Tue Feb 03, 2015 6:15 pm:[*] In Git a user wanting one aircraft from the fgdata repository would have to clone the entire repository, creating huge traffic.

Is this a common usage model? I'm not convinced that a user wanting one aircraft would go the version control route. I think they would be more likely to download a zip file from the Aircraft Download page. If the upcoming Aircraft Center were to be based on an FTP server serving archive files, this usage model would be reinforced.

I suspect the majority of end users who pull Aircraft from version control do so because:

(a) they want everything so that they avoid the blue glider in multiplayer
(b) they want all the aircraft to experiment with and a one-shot update of everything

With Subversion these users can and probably will checkout and update the trunk, just as they did with Git. The initial checkout is twice the size of the Git clone and therefore generates twice the traffic. So you'd only need half the user population who want to pull from version control to want a full checkout and you have the same traffic as with Git.

I checked out the trunk. It needed three or four attempts and took ages. The svn update is OK. I'm still clinging onto my Git aircraft because I have different branches with tweaks in them and I haven't sat down and figured how I can keep those changes over the top of updates from svn. With git it's just checkout master, pull, checkout branch, rebase on master. With svn I guess I'll need to make a git repository in each aircraft directory I want to fiddle with and have svn ignore the .git directory. Has anyone already done this and does the git-svn extension help?

[*] FlightGear already has a big enough repositories and traffic to cause friction with Gitorious.

A sound reason for moving from Gitorious.

[*] When SourceForge was asked about the possibility to move the larger parts of fgdata there, they gave a reassuring and positive answer.[/list]

Sourceforge also host Git repositories.

https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/GitHosting
http://sourceforge.net/create/

Did they only give a reassuring answer regarding Subversion?

Three things have happened here and not all are necessarily linked as far as I can see:

1. Non base-package aircraft have been switched to SVN
2. The repository is being switched from Gitorious to Sourceforge
3. Non base-package aircraft are being split from fgdata

The argument against Git seems to be primarily that Git is not very good at storing binary data, yet the checkout of the subversion trunk is twice the size of the git clone. Is there some other measure of Subversion's supremacy when it comes to binary data?

The split of aircraft from fgdata and the move from Gitorious to Sourceforge could have been done without abandoning Git for Subversion, whose only benefit appears to be the ability to checkout one aircraft at a time. Something I am not convinced many people want to do. Is there another reason the existing Git repository wasn't moved to Sourceforge?
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