jemalloc has settled into Firefox pretty nicely at this point, so after having mostly worked on Lyken for a few weeks while waiting for the dust to settle, I’m planning to start working on adding the necessary functionality to allow the Tamarin JavaScript engine to integrate without requiring a separately managed heap for garbage collection. One of the first things I ran into was that the Tamarin source code is available as a Mercurial repository, so it seemed like a good time to become familiar with yet another version control system (VCS).

Over the past ten years, there has been a proliferation of VCS’s, especially those supporting distributed development models (Arch, darcs, BitKeeper, git, svk, Mercurial, Bazaar, etc.), but for some reason I’ve found it difficult to get excited about them. The biggest barrier for me has been perceived complexity, but that is perhaps attributable in part to lack of exposure. Well, I’ve been exposed to Mercurial now, and I really like it so far.

I’ve primarily been using Subversion for the past several years, and much to my surprise, Mercurial felt completely natural almost right away. In fact, it was immediately easier to deal with branching and merging than it has ever been for me with any other VCS. I have historically avoided branched development when at all possible, because it has been hard to make sure that the VCS was doing what I intended.

While Stuart and I were getting jemalloc working in Firefox, we were tossing patches back and forth constantly. I spent a total of ~2 days just dealing with patch merges, and changes were dropped on the floor on multiple occasions. It occurs to me now that I could have avoided the majority of this work if we had been using something like Mercurial. We wouldn’t have lost changes, we wouldn’t have had mystery failures due to subtle patch conflicts, and so on.

Mercurial is so cool that I spent almost two full days trying to migrate my Subversion repositories. In particular, I was initially trying to convert the Lyken repository, which consisted of 1023 revisions and perhaps 1000 files, with a couple of vendor code imports and one temporary branch (all pretty straightforward as repositories go). I tried all of the following:

• hgsvn silently failed to commit 233 files, which made the resulting repository almost completely useless. I poked around in the code a bit and determined that fixing the problem myself would be a major undertaking.
• yahg2svn could only handle ‘trunk’, ‘branches’, and ‘tags’ at the top level, and I had ‘vendor’ as well. I hacked on the code a bit and probably could have gotten it to work eventually, but I moved on in pursuit of easier solutions.
• hg convert, which is an extension that comes with Mercurial, failed to do more than throw exceptions due to pickling failures.
• Tailor mostly worked, though it was completely broken as installed on my Ubuntu/amd64 7.10 system, so I had to install it manually. It got confused by a handful of revisions, but it merely left them as unmerged branches, and the fallout was minimal.

I never did find a complete example of how to use Tailor to convert a Subversion repository to Mercurial format, so here’s a bit more detail, in the hope that it will be of use to someone.

The command line I used was:

tailor -D -v -F "" --configfile lyken.tailor

The hard part though was coming up with the configuration file. Of course, the manual might have helped, had I found it before writing this blog post.

[DEFAULT]
verbose = True

[lyken]
target = hg:target
start-revision = INITIAL
root-directory = /home/jasone/tmp
state-file = tailor.state
source = svn:source
subdir = hg_lyken

[hg:target]

[svn:source]
module = /
repository = file:///home/jasone/tmp/svn_lyken

You can peruse the resulting repository to see what sorts of warts I had to clean up after the conversion. I have successfully converted several other repositories using the same method. The Onyx repository is giving Tailor a real workout though, since it consists of 3475 revisions and (this is the killer) due to how cvs2svn did things back when I switched to Subversion from CVS, there are 180 extant branches, 47 extant tags, and [gasp] 89087 extant files in the latest revision. It will probably take most of a day for Tailor to complete the conversion, and I can see in the log output that there are going to be a lot of problems in all the spontaneous branches cvs2svn generated.

Comments

At March 12, 2008 9:10 AM, past said…

jemalloc has settled into Firefox pretty nicely at this point, so after having mostly worked on Lyken for a few weeks while waiting for the dust to settle, I’m planning to start working on adding the necessary functionality to allow the Tamarin JavaScript engine to integrate without requiring a separately managed heap for garbage collection.

Could we also hope that you might take a stab at porting Tamarin to FreeBSD? It would be really appreciated!

At March 12, 2008 11:31 AM, Logan said…

I am also a recent switcher from Subversion to Mercurial, and agree that there are a lot of advantages to drcs. I never quite got it working on Windows when I first tried using it, but have loved using it on Linux.