Operator Precedence and Patches.

[ralph at inputplus.co.uk]

Hi Tony,

> > > Personally, I have only very recently put OSLib under CVS
> > > control, so that won't help you historically.
> > 
> > Fortunately, our baseline is your 6.30 so we need nothing earlier
> > than that.
> 
> Unfortunately, when I said "very recently", I meant, um, very
> recently ;-) The current baseline is V6.33; TBH, I'm really only just
> getting to grips with CVS, and haven't got round to some of it yet;
> not that it's hard, just a profusion of commands :-)

That's true.  I'm returning to it after a while and have a similiar
problem.  http://cvsbook.red-bean.com/cvsbook.html is a useful guide.

> Anyway, you've confused me now. Your initial query was for historical
> diffs, because only the latest few releases were available on the web
> site.

Yes, I was using fore-thought  :-)  If we baseline on 6.30 now and in a
year's time someone gets around to want to pick up fixes between 6.30
and the then latest 6.39 they'd not find all of those on the web site.

> However, 6.30, 6.31 and 6.32 are all there, so you can download them
> and generate your own diffs. So that problem's solved, AFAICS; Only
> 2.8 Mb ;-)

OK, will do, thanks.

> > How about patches from now on?  If you're using CVS and tagging the
> > releases then I think we're after
> > 
> >     cvs rdiff -r oslib-630 -r oslib-631 -u oslib |
> >     gzip -9 >oslib-630-631.patch.gz
> 
> Tags is one of the things I haven't yet got around to. I'm quite
> attracted to the idea of setting up a new repository with 6.30 as the
> baseline. I could certainly put the patch files in their own archive
> with each release. I could even do this retrospectively. Hmm... I'll
> have a play with it.
> 
> The next question is of timescales. Unless a major bug crops up, I
> wouldn't envisage a new release of OSLib until Autumn time; and I
> could probably commit myself to getting it into CVS with 6.30 as
> baseline by then, which would allow me to release diffs with each new
> release from then onwards. 

If I generate the 6.30 to 6.32 patches I could send them back if that
would help.  You could put 6.30 into CVS, tag it, patch it to 6.31,
check-in, tag, etc.

> I don't think many people download the source, so it is also quite
> attractive to place it all under CVS on SourceForge, and lose the
> source archives on my web site. In your experience with SourceForge,
> is it reliable?

Pretty good.

> Do you use the repository there as the master for your project?

For riscose?  Yes.  So do big projects, e.g. Python.

> Do you keep a local repository to use in case SourceForge becomes
> inaccessible?

No.  We three developers all have one or more local working copies, or
check-outs, on the go of course.

The SourceForge documentation describes how you can back-up the
repository files yourself whenever you want.  Don't know if that's done
on riscose.

> > Unfortunately, there's another `oslib' project at SourceForge
> > already so you'd have to augment the name.
>
> Hmm, yes, something like RISC_OS_OSLib, maybe.

That sounds like a topic to promote much discussion  :-)

Cheers,


Ralph.