[tei-council] Moving P5 to Sourceforge

[Lou Burnard]

At the council meeting in May 2004, it was agreed that the development
of TEI P5 should be done in public, using the version control system
provided by Sourceforge. The proviso was that the existing source should
first be cleaned up, and any large-scale changes made before the move.
These changes have now been made, and it is now time to consider exactly
how we will carry out the move to Sourceforge.

P5 is currently managed  at Oxford using a content management system
called Perforce. Moving the current data across to the CVS version
control system used on sourceforge is easy enough, but preserving all
the associated revision information is more problematic.  We identify
four possibilities:

1. convert the entire change history, including deletions, renames,
branching etc
2. convert recent change history of current files only
3. forget the history and import only the current state
4. import a snapshot and preserve the history externally

A full conversion (1) is technically possible, but forbiddingly
difficult to get right; it also has the disadvantage that it shows
everyone earlier messy states, and artefacts we wanted to remove. A
partial conversion (2) is less difficult, but would probably be regarded
as of purely symbolic interest. Losing history altogether (3) seems
entirely wrong, so we propose to attempt (4) the last method. This
involves the following steps:

1. Check and housekeep the current P5 tree to ensure it is usable
freestanding and complete; [to be complete by Jan 10]

2. Freeze current Perforce system, disallowing any further writes [to be
done January 14].  All information (including history) will remain
readable by the editors and assistants as now, for as long as our
perforce licence holds out.

3. Take a snapshot of the P5 tree and import it into CVS on Sourceforge
[to be done on Jan 14th]

4. Locate all the changes in Perforce which relate to the P5 tree
(about 400) and extract the details of each change to a text file; place
these files on the TEI web site with an HTML index file to allow
interested parties to reconstruct their history. [to be completed by Jan
31st]

5. On the TEI web site, document the tools and procedures needed to make
use of the P5 sources in CVS [to be completed by Jan 31st]

6. Make all future changes to P5 using CVS


Lou Burnard
Sebastian Rahtz
Syd Bauman