JHBuild

I’ve been doing most JHBuild development in my bzr branch recently. If you have bzr 0.8rc1 installed, you can grab it here:

bzr branch http://www.gnome.org/~jamesh/bzr/jhbuild/jhbuild.dev

I’ve been keeping a regular CVS import going at http://www.gnome.org/~jamesh/bzr/jhbuild/jhbuild.cvs using Tailor, so changes people make to module sets in CVS make there way into the bzr branch. I’ve used a small hack so that merges back into CVS get recorded correctly in the jhbuild.cvs branch:

1. Apply the diff between jhbuild.cvs and jhbuild.dev to my CVS checkout and commit.
2. Modify tailor to pause before committing the to jhbuild.cvs.
3. While tailor is paused, run bzr revert followed by a merge of the same changes from jhbuild.dev.
4. Let tailor complete the commit.

It’s a bit of a hack, but it allows me to do repeated merges from the CVS import to my development branch (and back again). It also means that any file moves I do in my bzr branch are reflected in the CVS import when merged.

So now when filing bug reports on jhbuild, you can submit fixes in the form of bzr branches as well as patches.

So, on to the improvements:

Generic Version Control Interface

Previously, to add support for a new version control system the following additions were needed:

• Some code to invoke the version control utility to make checkouts and update working trees.
• Code to implement the build state machine for modules using the version control system (these classes would generally derive from AutogenModule which implemented most of the build logic).
• Code to create instances of the above module type when parsing .modules files.

This was quite a bit of work, and in the end would only help if the code in question was set up to build the same way as most Gnome modules (i.e. with a autogen.sh script and autotools). If you wanted to build a module using Python distutils out of Subversion, a new module type would be needed. If you wanted to build a distutils module from a tarball, that would be another module type again.

With the new system, the different version control support modules provide a common interface. This means that a single module type is capable of implementing the build state machine for any version control system. Similarly, it should now be possible to implement distutils module support such that it will work with any supported version control system.

This work is not yet finished though. A bit more work needs to be done to parse version control system agnostic module definitions from .modules files. When this is done, a fair bit of the current syntax can be deprecated and eventually removed. When this is done, adding support for a new version control system shouldn’t take more than 100-200 lines.

Module Type Simplifications

As well as reducing the number of module types that need to be maintained in JHBuild, I’ve been working on simplifying the code in these module types. Previously, each stage of a module build was represented by a method call on the module type. The return value of the method was used to say (a) whether the stage succeeded or not, (b) what the next state would be and (c) if an error occurred some alternative next states to go to (e.g. offer to rerun autogen.sh).

With the new system, the next state and error states are declared as attributes on the method object. The method can indicate a failure by raising a particular exception. This greatly simplifies the cases where a build stage involves a number of separate actions that could each fail individually, since the exception cuts processing short without the error checks getting in the way of the code.

There are still a few module build stages not converted to the new system since their next state depends on various config settings (e.g. if running “make check” has been enabled or not). Since these generally involve skipping a stage based on some criteria, the plan is to move the logic to the stage being skipped, which should simplify things further.

In my previous post, I mentioned using Tailor to import jhbuild into a Bazaar-NG branch. In case anyone else is interested in doing the same, here are the steps I used:

1. Install the tools

First create a working directory to perform the import, and set up tailor. I currently use the nightly snapshots of bzr, which did not work with Tailor, so I also grabbed bzr-0.7:

$ wget http://darcs.arstecnica.it/tailor-0.9.20.tar.gz
$ wget http://www.bazaar-ng.org/pkg/bzr-0.7.tar.gz
$ tar xzf tailor-0.9.20.tar.gz
$ tar xzf bzr-0.7.tar.gz
$ ln -s ../bzr-0.7/bzrlib tailor-0.9.20/bzrlib

2. Prepare a local CVS Repository to import from

The import will run a lot faster with a local CVS repository. If you have a shell account on window.gnome.org, this is trivial to set up:

$ mkdir cvsroot
$ cvs -d `pwd`/cvsroot init
$ rsync -azP window.gnome.org:/cvs/gnome/jhbuild/ cvsroot/jhbuild/

3. Check for history inconsistency

As I discovered, Tailor will bomb if time goes backwards at some point in your CVS history, and will probably bomb out part way through. The quick fix for this is to directly edit the RCS ,v files to correct the dates. Since you are working with a copy of the repository, there isn’t any danger of screwing things up.

I wrote a small program to check an RCS file for such discontinuities:

http://www.gnome.org/~jamesh/code/backward-time.py

When editing the dates in the RCS files, make sure that you change the dates in the different files in a consistent way. You want to make sure that revisions in different files that are part of the same changeset still have the same date after the edits.

4. Create a Tailor config file

Here is the Tailor config file I used to import jhbuild:

#!
"""
[DEFAULT]
verbose = True
projects = jhbuild
encoding = utf-8

[jhbuild]
target = bzr:target
start-revision = INITIAL
root-directory = basedir/jhbuild.cvs
state-file = tailor.state
source = cvs:source
subdir = .
before-commit = remap_author
patch-name-format =

[bzr:target]
encoding = utf-8

[cvs:source]
module = jhbuild
repository = basedir/cvsroot
encoding = utf-8
"""

def remap_author(context, changeset):
    if '@' not in changeset.author:
        changeset.author = '%s <%s@cvs.gnome.org>' % (changeset.author,
                                                      changeset.author)
    return True

The remap_author function at the bottom maps the CVS user names to something closer to what bzr normally uses.

5. Perform the conversion

Now it is possible to run the conversion:

$ python tailor-0.9.20/tailor -vv --configfile jhbuild.tailor

When the conversion is complete, you should be left with a bzr branch containing the history of the HEAD branch from CVS. Now is a good time to check that the converted bzr looks sane.

6. Use the new branch

Rather than using the converted branch directly, it is a good idea to branch off it and do the development there:

$ bzr branch jhbuild.cvs jhbuild.dev

The advantage of doing this is that you have the option of rsyncing in new changes to the CVS repository and running tailor again to incrementally import them. You can then merge those changes to your development branch.

As most people probably know, the Gnome project is planning a migration to Subversion. In contrast, I’ve decided to move development of jhbuild over to bzr. This decision is a bit easier for me than for other Gnome modules because:

• No need to coordinate with GDP or GTP, since I maintain the docs and there is no translations.
• Outside of the moduleset definitions, the large majority of development and commits are done by me.
• There aren’t really any interesting branches other than the mainline.

I plan to leave the Gnome module set definitions in CVS/Subversion though, since many people help in keeping them up to date, so leaving them there has some value.

I performed a test conversion using Tailor 0.9.20. My first attempt at performing the conversion failed part way through. Looking at what had been imported, it was apparent that the first few changesets created weren’t the first changesets I’d created in CVS. What was weirder still was the dates on those changesets: they were dated 1997, while I hadn’t started jhbuild til 2001.

It turns out that it was caused by clock skew on the CVS server back in September 2003, so the revision dates for a few files are not monotonic. I did the quick fix of directly editing the RCS files (I was working off a local copy of the repo), which allowed the conversion to run through to completion. The problem has been reported as bug #37 in Tailor’s bug tracker.

This made me a bit worried about whether the CVS to Subversion conversion script being used for the rest of the Gnome modules was also vulnerable to this sort of clock skew problem. Sure enough it was, and the first real changeset of jhbuild had been imported as revision 323.

I did a bit more checking of the CVS repository, and found that there were 98 other modules exhibiting clock skew in their revision history, spread over 1245 files (some files with multiple points of skew). I’ve only checked the SVN test conversions of some of these modules, but all the ones I checked exhibited the same type of corruption.

It is going to be a fair bit of work cleaning it all up before the final conversion.