cvup mirrors and exact CVS dates

[Brad Davis]

On 10/25/07, Erik Cederstrand <erik at cederstrand.dk> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> I'm chugging along with the performance tracker project[1]. I have a
> script constantly building jails using the newest CURRENT sources, and
> since reproduceability is one of the goals, I have some questions
> regarding cvsup mirrors and CVS in general (hope it's OK on this list):
>
> 1) To identify the jails, I name them after the CVS date I put in the
> cvsup file. Now, if the date is now() (converted to UTC), can I be sure
> that any given mirror (retrieved by fastest_cvsup) has the same set of
> files? Or will some mirrors be behind and happily give me sources that
> are older than what the main CVS server would report for that specific
> CVS date?
>
> 2) On the same note, is there any way to uniquely identify a global
> revision of the FreeBSD source tree, comparable to revisions in
> Subversion? From what I understand, there is no way to know if e.g. CVS
> dates 2007.10.25.13.45.00 and 2007.10.25.13.46.00 represent the same
> source code, except updating to both dates and seeing if any files change.

I don't think building jails would accomplish the goal of this task as
it is still using the underlying OS version to do everything.

For snapshots.us.freebsd.org I use CVSCMDARGS="-D 00:00:00 UTC" to
build every day. that way I know exactly when the code was from. It
also helps I'm using a cvsup server I control (cvsup14), so I know
exactly when it updates. I kick off the build at 03:00 so there is
plenty of time for changes to filter down from cvsup-master.

Most cvsup servers are on a one hour update cycle.


Regards,
Brad Davis