vdboor - Technology

Moving KMess from subversion to Git

nospam@example.com (Diederik van der Boor) — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 23:23:00 +0200

Today I've been busy converting the KMess svn repository to git. [for the uninitiated: both svn and git are tools to track changes in the source code of an application. KMess is a MSN Messenger client for KDE ]. The reasons for git are twofold:

KDE is moving to git.
Instead of trying to move from sourceforge -> KDE extragear now, we can directly move to git.
We seriously need better merge support now.
As we're working on KMess 2.1 a lot of refactoring will happen; to create a library of our protocol code, and provide a plugin API. This requires branches for large changes, while continiously merging the mainline. Git can do this.

Which brings me back to today. Since our repository is also organized like KDE (/trunk/projectname/...) using svn-all-fast-export (made by Thiago) was the natural choice. This tool uses a "rules" file to specify which project a given repository paths should go to. It also offers ways to filter out commits.

Turns out that last feature is useful for us too. While the repository may look clean from the outside, it's history has some curlpits. A few times branches were created from the wrong path, deleted again, and recreated with the correct path. These can be filtered out.

Installing svn-all-fast-export

There are no binaries for the the application, so you'll have to run:

git clone git://repo.or.cz/svn-all-fast-export.git
cd svn-all-fast-export
qmake fast-export2.pro
make

The devel packages for Qt, subversion and apr need to be installed. For openSUSE 11.1 I had to correct the file src/Makefile afterwards because the path to apr include path wasn't /usr/include/apr-1.0 but/usr/include/apr-1 instead.

Using it

First, you'll have to create a rules file. There are plenty of examples in the "examples" folder for this.

The documentation of svn-all-fast-export is absent at the moment - except for a few sample rule files. Fortunately the source code was quite readable, and it's Qt 4 application. Looking at the source, I've learned:

The option --identity-map=<file..> can be used to convert the svn accountnames to git's "full name <email>" format.
The options --resume-from and --max-rev can be used to continue at a given part (e.g. after getting an error, you can write a rule for it, and continue with that revision).
The output directory for every sub-project (repository with git) needs to exist already, and it should be initialized with git init. Not doing this gives an "broken pipe" abort, and you'll find yourself looking through the source code to find out why.

The result of my day includes of a large rules file, and shell scripts to automate everything. I've stored it in our subversion repository in a separate trunk/svn-to-git project, so feel free to look around. I hope these scripts can help you too. One thing.. there is again no documentation.... Read the source

Issues left open

There are a few issues I haven't been able to solve yet.

A few sub projects were moved across the repository, which is split in separate git repositories (svn paths: /trunk/libisf -> /trunk/kmess/contrib/libisf). Is there a way to preserve the history for this?
The network-library branch was branched off /trunk/ instead of /trunk/kmess/, and moved afterwards to a different location. I've tried to mark both folders with /kmess/ appended as being part of the branch. Now I'm stuck with a network-library branch which lacks the base revision. Only the changed files can be found in the branch.

For these final issues I'd like to know: is there a way this can be solved?

openSUSE running on a MacBook

nospam@example.com (Diederik van der Boor) — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 17:42:00 +0200

Lately I got a request to blog more about the progress of KMess, and I've been scratching an itch on it. Since we're about to release a "KMess 2.0 beta 2" release I'll delay that for later today/tomorrow.

The train from work to home also started to get a bit boring so I've decided to install openSUSE on my MacBook. I really wanted to do this because KDE 4.2 is looking so sweet. Running OS X didn't feel right anymore at all.

The setup was a bit difficult due to EFI-partitioning being messed up, but the actual install was easy. In case you're looking for a HOWTO, the openSUSE wiki pages give you everything you need. Most hardware seams to be working, including: bluetooth, wifi, audio, compositing, video out, special keys, sensors, iSight webcam (requires firmware). There are some quirks remaining though: at the login I briefly see some video memory garbage and the synaptics touchpad sometimes gets locked after suspend to ram.

However, now I can have some fun in the train, show pictures to friends easier, potentially expose Linux/KDE4 to more people, read cached e-mail, etc... Perhaps I could code somewhat, but most of my energy is still spent on my daily job and the renovation of my apartment in the evenings/weekends. I'll blog a bit more about that later.

Introducing PhpPlanet: PHP feed aggregation software

nospam@example.com (Diederik van der Boor) — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 00:35:00 +0100

One of the things I really wanted to implement was a "Planet KMess" section at the KMess website. I've been looking for existing solutions, but couldn't find what I was looking for. I don't need expanding sections, or forum/e-mail like "mark as read" capabilities. Just a simple web page with all stories, posted in order.

As for why I'm not using Planet: the Planet KDE site is flooded with old feeds now and then. I don't want to see that happening for a "Planet KMess" website. Planet is written in Python and uses a file-based cache. This is a complete black box for me as Python illiterate, and adds Python as new dependency to the web site.

The result is a new Planet-like feed reader/aggregator named PhpPlanet. It is v0.1 software and can be downloaded here. It stores feeds in a MySQL database, and uses Snoopy/MagpieRSS to parse the feeds. Flooding is avoided by observing the timestamp of RSS entries. When multiple entries have the same timestamp it's an indication the feed is regenerated, and those entries will be rejected automatically.