Since 2009.07.04, our source code repository is stored in subversion on kontiki2.bitplane.com. To check out the current trunk into the new directory mysources, do

svn checkout svn://kontiki2.bitplane.com/_REPOSITORY_SVN/trunk mysources

If you only need a subdirectory of the _REPOSITORY_SVN, choose the corresponding call from:

svn ls svn://kontiki2.bitplane.com/_REPOSITORY_SVN/trunk
svn checkout svn://kontiki2.bitplane.com/_REPOSITORY_SVN/trunk/<directory> <directory>

Currently, we have the following Repositories available:

bitbase
bitplane
bitplane2003
bitplane2005
bitplane2008
imarisXT
installation
manual
matlab
neuronTracer
software
wda

• A good cvs2svn introduction can be found here: http://cvs2svn.tigris.org/cvs2svn.html
• details specific to OpenSUSE can be found here: http://en.opensuse.org/Subversion

To convert the CVS repository to Subversion, first install subversion and cvs2svn on kontiki2 via yast: install subversion cvs2svn

The service svnserve should not run as root user. The startup script /etc/init.d/svnserve expects a user/group named 'svn', but this user/group must be created before first use. First, we check it does not already exist (this guide may be outdated by the time you read it!)

grep svn /etc/passwd /etc/group

If the grep does not return a hit, you should create a group and user for svnserve, named svn. It is a good idea to disable login for this user by setting the shell to /bin/false.

sudo groupadd --system svn
sudo useradd --system --gid svn svn
sudo usermod --shell /bin/false svn

Then we create a new, empty subversion repository. First, the directory is created. Then use svnadmin to create the configuration skeleton. We do not use the default OpenSUSE location /srv/svn/, but rather the Bitplane location /development/ for the new repository _REPOSITORY_SVN. Make sure that the files of the repository are accessible by the user “svn”. It would be best to give exclusive read and write access of the whole repository directory tree only to the user svn.

sudo mkdir -p /development/_REPOSITORY_SVN
sudo svnadmin create /development/_REPOSITORY_SVN
sudo chown -R svn:svn /development/_REPOSITORY_SVN
sudo ls -la /development/_REPOSITORY_SVN

drwxr-xr-x  2 svn  svn         128 2009-07-04 11:38 conf
drwxr-xr-x  2 svn  svn          48 2009-07-04 11:38 dav
drwxr-sr-x  5 svn  svn         256 2009-07-04 11:38 db
-r--r--r--  1 svn  svn           2 2009-07-04 11:38 format
drwxr-xr-x  2 svn  svn         360 2009-07-04 11:38 hooks
drwxr-xr-x  2 svn  svn         104 2009-07-04 11:38 locks
-rw-r--r--  1 svn  svn         229 2009-07-04 11:38 README.txt

To change the default repository location that svnserve should serve, and the access permissions, use YAST. Go to “Network Services” → “Network Services (xinetd)” → “svn” → “Edit” → “Server Arguments”. There you can set the repository root path, and the read-write-access, by changing the arguments from

# --read-only --root=/srv/svn/repos --inetd

to

--root=/development/_REPOSITORY_SVN --inetd

Then enable the service by using the Toggle Status (On or Off) option in YAST. To configure the user access rights for the repository, continue with the next section.

For subversion, all configuration files (svnserve.conf, passwd, authz) are located in the folder [repository]/conf/. The default permissions are world-readable, it is a very good idea to change them to something as strictly as possible.

sudo chmod u=rw,g=,o= /development/_REPOSITORY_SVN/conf/*
sudo chmod u=rwx,g=,o= /development/_REPOSITORY_SVN/conf
ls -la /development/_REPOSITORY_SVN/conf/
total 12
-rw------- 1 svn svn  684 2009-07-04 11:38 authz
-rw------- 1 svn svn  309 2009-07-04 11:38 passwd
-rw------- 1 svn svn 1457 2009-07-04 11:38 svnserve.conf

The svnserve.conf controls access permissions and the location of the other two configuration files passwd and authz. For the Bitplane setup, we want no anonymous access (anon-access = none), and we grant write permissions to authenticated users (auth-access = write). The password database file is located in the default location in the conf/ directory (password-db = passwd). For a very detailed control of access permissions, the authz-db file could be used, but that seems to be overkill for our simple setup (# authz-db). For a more intuitive feel, we can set the password realm to Bitplane (realm = Bitplane).

sudo cat /development/_REPOSITORY_SVN/conf/svnserve.conf
[general]
### These options control access to the repository for unauthenticated
### and authenticated users.  Valid values are "write", "read",
### and "none".  The sample settings below are the defaults.
anon-access = none
auth-access = write
###
### The password-db option controls the location of the password
### database file.
password-db = passwd
###
### The authz-db option controls the location of the authorization
### rules for path-based access control.
#  authz-db = authz
###
### This option specifies the authentication realm of the repository.
realm = Bitplane

Password authentication is done in plaintext, using the file passwd

sudo cat /development/_REPOSITORY_SVN/conf/passwd
[users]
emmenlau = my_plaintext_passwd

It is now already possible to log into the Subversion server and list the available modules.

svn ls svn://kontiki2.bitplane.com/
Authentication realm: <svn://kontiki2.bitplane.com:3690> Bitplane
Password for 'emmenlau':

This is partially an empty-set-joke

In order for the CVS repository to stay available unmodified, one can remove write permissions by adding an empty writers file.

if test -e /development/_REPOSITORY/CVSROOT/writers ; then
  sudo mv /development/_REPOSITORY/CVSROOT/writers /development/_REPOSITORY/CVSROOT/writers.bak
fi
sudo touch /development/_REPOSITORY/CVSROOT/writers && \
sudo chmod 644 /development/_REPOSITORY/CVSROOT/writers

When trying a commit now, CVS will report

commit -l -m "whitespace changes only" thirdparty/zlib-1.2.3.pro
cvs [server aborted]: "commit" requires write access to the repository

The goal now is to generate a CVS dump containing all previous CVS operations from the CVS repository. This dump could now be generated from the readonly CVS repository, but we might want to make changes to the repo before creating the dump. Therefore we create a copy first.

sudo mkdir -p /development/tmp/ && \
sudo cp -par /development/_REPOSITORY /development/tmp/

The only change we want to make is to do some cleanup, then rename the bitplane directory to bitplane1993, and to rename the bitplane2008 directory back to its basic form bitplane.

sudo chown -R root:root /development/tmp/_REPOSITORY
sudo find /development/tmp/_REPOSITORY/ -name .DS_Store -exec rm -f \{\} \;
sudo mv /development/tmp/_REPOSITORY/bitplane /development/tmp/_REPOSITORY/bitplane1993
sudo mv /development/tmp/_REPOSITORY/bitplane2008 /development/tmp/_REPOSITORY/bitplane

Now would also be the time to remove unwanted directories from the tree, but we do not do that here.

# rm -fr /development/tmp/_REPOSITORY/installation

There is a bug in the CVS repository that needs to be addressed before the dump can be created. The symbol NeuronTracerInitial is multiply defined in some files. Here is a call that removes (arbitrarily chosen) one of the symbols.

sudo grep --binary-files=text -rn "NeuronTracerInitial.*NeuronTracerInitial" \
    /development/tmp/_REPOSITORY/neuronTracer \
    |cut -d':' -f1 \
    |while read FILENAME ; do \
         sudo perl -pi -e 's/NeuronTracerInitial.*(NeuronTracerInitial)/$1/g' "$FILENAME" ; \
     done
sudo grep --binary-files=text -rn "NeuronTracerInitial:1.1.1.1$" \
    /development/tmp/_REPOSITORY/neuronTracer \
    |cut -d':' -f1 \
    |while read FILENAME ; do \
         sudo perl -pi -e 's/\s+NeuronTracerInitial:1.1.1.1\s+//g' "$FILENAME" ; \
     done

The CVS repository can now be exported into a set of operations that created it. To generate the Subversion dump file, containing all commits and changes, run cvs2svn on the repository structure. There is a potential line ending problem involved in this process. If binary files have not been added with the CVS -kb flag, the line endings in the binary files might have been converted. This is an issue when porting the file to Subversion, as the latter does not usually “destroy” binary files in this way. One can use the cvs2svn flags –eol-from-mime-type to convert line endings automatically. This should not be required at Bitplane. First, a test-run (–dry-run):

sudo rm -f /development/tmp/_REPOSITORY.dump
sudo cvs2svn --encoding="ASCII" --encoding="UTF-8" --encoding="ISO-8859-1" \
    --dumpfile=/development/tmp/_REPOSITORY.dump \
    /development/tmp/_REPOSITORY 2>&1|tee /tmp/cvs2svn.log

cvs2svn Statistics:
------------------
Total CVS Files:             59080
Total CVS Revisions:        165571
Total Unique Tags:              24
Total Unique Branches:          18
CVS Repos Size in KB:     11994524
Total SVN Commits:           16325
First Revision Date:    Mon Aug 18 16:11:20 1997
Last Revision Date:     Fri Jul  3 17:20:09 2009
------------------
Timings:
------------------
pass 1:   518 seconds
pass 2:     0 seconds
pass 3:    23 seconds
pass 4:     0 seconds
pass 5:    15 seconds
pass 6:    46 seconds
pass 7:     1 second
pass 8:     1 second
pass 9:  2573 seconds
total:   3179 seconds

Once the dump file has been successfully generated, it can be imported into the Subversion repository.

cd /development/
sudo tar -czf _REPOSITORY_SVN_2009.07.04.tar.gz _REPOSITORY_SVN
sudo svnadmin load /development/_REPOSITORY_SVN < /development/tmp/_REPOSITORY.dump

the svndumpfilter produced a dump that could not be imported into subversion. Do not use it.

The dump can be optimized by piping it through svndumpfilter to remove empty revisions, remove the CVSROOT directory, and to fix the ordering of revisions if needed.

sudo chmod 777 /development/tmp
sudo cat /development/tmp/_REPOSITORY.dump|svndumpfilter \
    --drop-empty-revs \
    --renumber-revs \
    exclude trunk/CVSROOT \
    >/development/tmp/_REPOSITORY.dump.filter

the rest of this document is unneeded, and only here for reference.

See http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.4/svn.reposadmin.maint.html for details of this step.