Re: Nmap and SVN Externals

[David Fifield <david () bamsoftware com>]

On Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 05:02:15PM -0700, Fyodor wrote:
> So those are the problems and benefits of externals as they are used
> now.  Maybe someone can pipe up with other pros and cons they have
> seen with the way Nmap svn is organized.  But there are other options
> we could do instead.  The ones which come to mind immediately are:
>
> 1) We could svn mv /nsock, /ncat, /nping, and the like all under
>    /nmap.  This would "solve" the problem of dealing with externals
>    for Nmap, but I think it is a bit worse of an organizational
>    structure.  And problems like Ncat wouldn't be helped.  They'd just
>    have to change their svn:externals /nmap/nsock and /nmap/nbase
>    rather than /nsock and /nbase.  Still the vast majority of our work
>    is Nmap-related, so this technique is worth considering.

Number 1 is what I think should happen. I don't think it's a poor
organization.

> 2) I thought that if we got ride of the svn:externals and had users
>    manually checkout nmap and then cd there and checkout /nsock,
>    /nbase, and the like underneath, that would work better.  But upon
>    further testing, that works worse than the externals approach.  It
>    means you have to specify the "external" directories even for svn
>    update, and svn status doesn't tell you about changes in the
>    subdirs.  So scratch that.
>
> 3) Switch to another revision control system, such as git.  I don't
>    think git can handle per-user read access control for the private
>    parts of the repository (I have system configuration files and all
>    sorts of other crap there), but we could potentially split off the
>    public Nmap stuff into its own repository.  Of course switching to
>    a new RCS would be a major pain.

In git we would have separate repositories for different projects, not
everything in one big repository like we have now. For example we could
have git://git.nmap.org/nmap.git and git://git.nmap.org/nmap-private-dev.git,
with different access controls. See https://gitweb.torproject.org/ for
an example of lots of repositories being served by the same server.

David Fifield
_______________________________________________
Sent through the nmap-dev mailing list
http://cgi.insecure.org/mailman/listinfo/nmap-dev
Archived at http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/