(Editor’s note: CVS is the best method to get up to the date
sources. LinuxPower once ran an
article on how to compile GNOME from CVS. )
Dear GNOME fans,
We (as in "the people who maintain the anoncvs mirrors") are having big
problems with the anoncvs mirrors. The load average on Phil's server is at
70. The server I help run at CUC is now refusing telnet connections
because I turned anoncvs back on. Mandrake's server is at load average
180, with over 200 people using it at the moment. Other mirrors are out of
date or dead. To make matters worse, the gnome.org DNS maintainer hasn't
responded to DNS update requests to add a new server.
As you can see, anoncvs is in a very sorry state.
I think anoncvs is a nice idea for letting people get up-to-date sources
when they need them, but cvs consumes major system resources. If, like I,
you would like to see anoncvs continue, here are some of the steps you can
take:
1. Volunteer to host a server. You need to be on a fast
connection (T1-ish) and a machine with at least 600M of disk space
dedicated to anoncvs. The speed of the machine is not vitally
important, because as long as we get enough people to volunteer
in this manner, the load will be distributed across these slower
machines.
2. Get more RAM for the people who already have servers.
I stopped running CVS on my personal machine because it
was interfering with my GNOME development. Phil has been
having to endure a machine that takes a few seconds to display
every character he types into an IRC session. Having more RAM
is the single most important thing to speeding up CVS.
Where every single anoncvs user can help:
3. Smart updating.
(a) Do not update your whole tree with one command.
Update each module individual and sequentially,
so that the server side process does not take 25M of
RAM. It will be slightly slower than doing one big
upgrade, but definitely faster than having no
anoncvs and waiting for tarball releases.
(b) Do not update too frequently. The rule that I would
request people follow is to update once a day at most.
If you encounter bugs during your daily build and
would like to get fixes for them, please make sure
by reading your cvs-commits-list mail that someone has
committed a fix for the problem before trying a second
update. Do not put your update script into crontab
either. Run it when you need it.
The importance of these points will only increase as GNOME
becomes more popular, and the demand for anoncvs service
increases.
Spread this message to everyone who might ever have inhaled the air that
an anoncvs mirror used. :)