Remove bzr, cvs, darcs, fossil and svn support #4802

tarsius · 2017-06-14T23:42:41Z

This isn't the first time that I suggest that Melpa should drop support for little used fetchers. Unfortunately I cannot find those discussions anymore. If I remember correctly, @purcell's position was that he is not opposed on principal, but that he sees no reason to do so until these fetchers start causing issues.

The removal of some fetchers has recently come up again in #4798, where @Fuco1 said:

All complex systems tend to break, this is a given in programming. Reducing complexity promotes experimentation and growth. When rolling out "partial support" is met without much enthusiams, then we should simply drop the support altogether.

I agree with that. I have contributed to package-build.el in the past and the existence of little used fetchers was indeed an issue for me.

This pull requests attempts to demonstrate how we can drop support for three vcs fetchers without losing much. I hope that by making the proposal very concrete, we can actually reach a decision on whether to do this or not.

Please see the commit messages for details. Here is a summary:

Drop support for the fossil fetcher. Not a single package used it.
Drop support for the bzr fetcher. The two recipes that still used bzr now import from stale repositories on the Emacsorphanage. The upstream repositories have not seen any commits in years. But in the unlikely event that upstream decided to resume work, we would not automatically notice that.
Drop support for the darcs fetcher. The two recipes that still used darcs now import from active repositories on the Emacsmirror. These repositories are only updated periodically, so there sometimes will be delays.

So by migrating four packages we can drop support for three fetchers. There are small drawbacks as mentioned, but I think that the reduced complexity outweigh those by far.

Support for cvs and svn cannot be dropped yet because this pr only migrates seven out of the remaining ~~thirteen~~ twelve packages to the Emacsmirror.

Two cvs-using packages have not been migrated so far. Both of these packages actually live in the same repository and I have asked upstream to consider a move to git (but have not gotten a reply yet). If that's what it takes, then I am willing to periodically import the cvs repository myself.
~~Four~~ Three svn-using packages have not been migrated so far because they consist of more than one library, which means that the Emacsmirror cannot use its file fetcher.
- caml last updated two years ago. Let's ask upstream to migrate, but there is a good change that would fail.
- confluence last updated two years ago. Let's ask upstream to migrate.
- dic-lookup-w3m actively maintained. Let's ask upstream to migrate.
- ruby-electric @knu the file in the svn repository contains a link to https://github.com/knu/ruby-electric.el. Is the git repository up-to-date/ahead? Old discussion in Add ruby-additional, elisp files in the CRuby distribution. #1079. [Given that the url in both the svn and git repository points at the git repository, I decided that lacking a response the git repository should be preferred.]

dunn · 2017-06-14T23:47:17Z

package-build/package-build.el

@@ -803,9 +684,6 @@ Optionally PRETTY-PRINT the data."
         "--exclude=CVS"
         "--exclude=.git"
         "--exclude=_darcs"


This line can go too, right?

Yes, thanks for catching that.

dunn · 2017-06-14T23:47:44Z

scripts/bootstrap

@@ -12,9 +12,7 @@ sudo ${SUDOENV} apt-get -y install \
    bzr \


Can kill bzr here too?

tarsius · 2017-06-15T00:07:53Z

Note that the changes to package-build.el should be made in its own repository. I haven't done that yet to make it easier to review all the changes in one place.

Fuco1 · 2017-06-15T10:47:52Z

@tarsius thank you very much for taking up the time, I know you are super busy. Let me know if I can do some work, I will happily donate some time to this as well.

tarsius · 2017-06-17T17:45:15Z

Let me know if I can do some work,

You could send friendly mails to the maintainers of packages that still use svn or cvs and offer to help them convert to git. Start by trying to convince the maintainer of w3m. If you succeed in that, then we can drop cvs support.

purcell · 2017-09-09T03:50:26Z

I feel a bit weird about relying on Emacsmirror, but I'd be happy to merge this if the conflicts get resolved. Would you then sync the changes back to the package-build repo, @tarsius?

tarsius · 2017-09-09T11:03:33Z

I am now importing the full history of most of these packages into git repositories using a simple Makefile again. More on that later -- this response is about two of the four packages that I do not import again (yet?).

debian-bug and debian-changelog-mode are only interesting to Debian users, who actually contribute to Debian, and who probably would not mind installing them using apt-get install debian-el dpkg-dev-el (which has the added benefit that these packages come with other closely related Emacs libraries).

debian-bug has been downloaded only 69 times from Melpa and debian-changelog-mode only 168 times.

So my suggestion is that those two packages are removed from Melpa.

purcell · 2017-09-09T11:15:39Z

debian-bug has been downloaded only 69 times from Melpa and debian-changelog-mode only 168 times. So my suggestion is that those two packages are removed from Melpa.

Fine with me!

tarsius · 2017-09-09T11:16:27Z

Okay will do it.

dunn · 2017-09-09T18:59:35Z

package-build/package-build.el

@@ -802,10 +583,6 @@ Optionally PRETTY-PRINT the data."
         "--exclude=.svn"
         "--exclude=CVS"


This can go too, probably.

dunn · 2017-09-09T19:00:13Z

package-build/package-build.el

@@ -1524,7 +1301,7 @@ If FILE-NAME is not specified, the default archive-contents file is used."
   (list (intern (read-string "Package name: "))
         (intern (completing-read "Fetcher: "
                                  (list "github" "gitlab" "bitbucket"
-                                        "git" "wiki" "bzr" "hg" "cvs" "svn")
+                                        "git" "wiki" "hg" "cvs" "svn")


We can't also drop cvs and svn from this list?

The upstreams of these packages use some version control system other than Git or Mercurial. As you can see there are very few such packages, which is why support was removed from Melpa (not having to support five vcs for the benefit of a handful of packages makes it more appealing to improve the remaining code). See #4802. Before this commit this was already done for these packages: | Package (2) | Vcs | Last commit | Commits last year | |-------------------+--------+-----------------------+-------------------| | swbuff | cvs | 10 years ago | 0 | | vc-fossil | fossil | 4 hours ago | 1 | Now we do it for these too: | Package (12) | Vcs | Last commit | Commits last year | |-------------------+--------+-----------------------+-------------------| | caml | svn | 1 year, 11 months ago | 0 | | cg | svn | 7 months ago | 2 | | clang-format | svn | 4 weeks ago | 26 | | color-theme | bzr | 8 years ago | 0 | | confluence | svn | 6 weeks ago | 1 | | darcsum | darcs | 4 hours ago | 1 | | dic-lookup-w3m | svn | 5 weeks ago | 4 | | dsvn | svn | 6 weeks ago | 1 | | helm-ls-svn | svn | 2 years, 2 months ago | 0 | | ruby-additional | svn | 3 weeks ago | 12 | | tex-smart-umlauts | darcs | 4 hours ago | 1 | | w3m | cvs | 3 weeks ago | 74 | ... well as `shimbun', which is part of the `w3m' repository.

Not having to support five vcs for the benefit of a handful of packages makes it more appealing to improve the remaining code). See #4802.

The upstreams of these packages use some version control system other than Git or Mercurial. As you can see there are very few such packages, which is why support was removed from Melpa (not having to support five vcs for the benefit of a handful of packages makes it more appealing to improve the remaining code). See #4802. Before this commit this was already done for these packages: | Package (2) | Vcs | Last commit | Commits last year | |-------------------+--------+-----------------------+-------------------| | swbuff | cvs | 10 years ago | 0 | | vc-fossil | fossil | 4 hours ago | 1 | Now we do it for these too: | Package (12) | Vcs | Last commit | Commits last year | |-------------------+--------+-----------------------+-------------------| | caml | svn | 1 year, 11 months ago | 0 | | cg | svn | 7 months ago | 2 | | clang-format | svn | 4 weeks ago | 26 | | color-theme | bzr | 8 years ago | 0 | | confluence | svn | 6 weeks ago | 1 | | darcsum | darcs | 4 hours ago | 1 | | dic-lookup-w3m | svn | 5 weeks ago | 4 | | dsvn | svn | 6 weeks ago | 1 | | helm-ls-svn | svn | 2 years, 2 months ago | 0 | | ruby-additional | svn | 3 weeks ago | 12 | | tex-smart-umlauts | darcs | 4 hours ago | 1 | | w3m | cvs | 3 weeks ago | 74 | ... as well as `shimbun', which is part of the `w3m' repository.

Not having to support five vcs for the benefit of a handful of packages makes it more appealing to improve the remaining code). See #4802.

The upstreams of these packages use some version control system other than Git or Mercurial. As you can see there are very few such packages, which is why support was removed from Melpa (not having to support five vcs for the benefit of a handful of packages makes it more appealing to improve the remaining code). See #4802. Before this commit this was already done for these packages: | Package (2) | Vcs | Last commit | Commits last year | |-------------------+--------+-----------------------+-------------------| | swbuff | cvs | 10 years ago | 0 | | vc-fossil | fossil | 4 weeks ago | 1 | Now we do it for these too: | Package (12) | Vcs | Last commit | Commits last year | |-------------------+--------+-----------------------+-------------------| | caml | svn | 1 year, 11 months ago | 0 | | cg | svn | 7 months ago | 2 | | clang-format | svn | 4 weeks ago | 26 | | color-theme | bzr | 8 years ago | 0 | | confluence | svn | 6 weeks ago | 1 | | darcsum | darcs | 3 years, 4 months ago | 0 | | dic-lookup-w3m | svn | 5 weeks ago | 4 | | dsvn | svn | 6 weeks ago | 1 | | helm-ls-svn | svn | 2 years, 2 months ago | 0 | | ruby-additional | svn | 3 weeks ago | 12 | | tex-smart-umlauts | darcs | 1 year, 4 months ago | 0 | | w3m | cvs | 3 weeks ago | 74 | ... as well as `shimbun', which is part of the `w3m' repository.

Not having to support five vcs for the benefit of a handful of packages makes it more appealing to improve the remaining code). See #4802.

See melpa/melpa#4802.

alphapapa · 2017-09-10T09:09:11Z

Just a thought: developers who run other distros (or even, e.g. OS X) but also package their software for Debian may find debian-changelog-mode useful, and installing it manually by extracting it from the deb would be a pain.

The upstreams of these packages use some version control system other than Git or Mercurial. As you can see there are very few such packages, which is why support was removed from Melpa (not having to support five vcs for the benefit of a handful of packages makes it more appealing to improve the remaining code). See #4802. Before this commit this was already done for these packages: | Package (2) | Vcs | Last commit | Commits last year | |-------------------+--------+-----------------------+-------------------| | swbuff | cvs | 10 years ago | 0 | | vc-fossil | fossil | 4 weeks ago | 1 | Now we do it for these too: | Package (12) | Vcs | Last commit | Commits last year | |-------------------+--------+-----------------------+-------------------| | caml | svn | 1 year, 11 months ago | 0 | | cg | svn | 7 months ago | 2 | | clang-format | svn | 4 weeks ago | 26 | | color-theme | bzr | 8 years ago | 0 | | confluence | svn | 6 weeks ago | 1 | | darcsum | darcs | 3 years, 4 months ago | 0 | | dic-lookup-w3m | svn | 5 weeks ago | 4 | | dsvn | svn | 6 weeks ago | 1 | | helm-ls-svn | svn | 2 years, 2 months ago | 0 | | ruby-additional | svn | 3 weeks ago | 12 | | tex-smart-umlauts | darcs | 1 year, 4 months ago | 0 | | w3m | cvs | 3 weeks ago | 74 | ... as well as `shimbun', which is part of the `w3m' repository. A more or less up-to-date version of this table can be found at https://emacsmirror.net/stats/melpa.html.

Not having to support five vcs for the benefit of a handful of packages makes it more appealing to improve the remaining code). See #4802.

The upstreams of these packages use some version control system other than Git or Mercurial. As you can see there are very few such packages, which is why support was removed from Melpa (not having to support five vcs for the benefit of a handful of packages makes it more appealing to improve the remaining code). See #4802. Before this commit this was already done for these packages: | Package (2) | Vcs | Last commit | Commits last year | |-------------------+--------+-----------------------+-------------------| | swbuff | cvs | 10 years ago | 0 | | vc-fossil | fossil | 4 weeks ago | 1 | Now we do it for these too: | Package (11) | Vcs | Last commit | Commits last year | |-------------------+--------+-----------------------+-------------------| | cg | svn | 7 months ago | 2 | | clang-format | svn | 4 weeks ago | 26 | | color-theme | bzr | 8 years ago | 0 | | confluence | svn | 6 weeks ago | 1 | | darcsum | darcs | 3 years, 4 months ago | 0 | | dic-lookup-w3m | svn | 5 weeks ago | 4 | | dsvn | svn | 6 weeks ago | 1 | | helm-ls-svn | svn | 2 years, 2 months ago | 0 | | ruby-additional | svn | 3 weeks ago | 12 | | tex-smart-umlauts | darcs | 1 year, 4 months ago | 0 | | w3m | cvs | 3 weeks ago | 74 | ... as well as `shimbun', which is part of the `w3m' repository. A more or less up-to-date version of this table can be found at https://emacsmirror.net/stats/melpa.html.

Not having to support five vcs for the benefit of a handful of packages makes it more appealing to improve the remaining code). See #4802.

joewreschnig · 2017-09-16T18:56:47Z

I think it would be worthwhile to split off parts of this for each VCS, as each has different issues:

Fossil is literally unused, and could go right away right now and no one would notice.
CVS is fundamentally insecure, and at some point the bullet must be bit and we drop w3m (the only remaining repository) because of that alone.
Bzr is dead, unofficially for certain if not officially yet. (Even its official download page ~~no longer works~~ did not work when I wrote this.)
Darcs and Subversion should probably be discouraged, but are secure and actively maintained. The only reason to remove them is the maintenance burden on MELPA.

joewreschnig · 2017-09-16T19:05:11Z

Just a thought: developers who run other distros (or even, e.g. OS X) but also package their software for Debian may find debian-changelog-mode useful, and installing it manually by extracting it from the deb would be a pain.

This is the situation I'm in now, but what the removal is probably going to do is get me off my butt to fork and modernize the package, so I think it's win/win (other than my free time).

tarsius · 2017-09-19T07:43:44Z

Ups...

The upstreams of these packages use some version control system other than Git or Mercurial. As you can see there are very few such packages, which is why support was removed from Melpa (not having to support five vcs for the benefit of a handful of packages makes it more appealing to improve the remaining code). See #4802. Before this commit this was already done for these packages: | Package (2) | Vcs | Last commit | Commits last year | |-------------------+--------+-----------------------+-------------------| | swbuff | cvs | 10 years ago | 0 | | vc-fossil | fossil | 4 weeks ago | 1 | Now we do it for these too: | Package (11) | Vcs | Last commit | Commits last year | |-------------------+--------+-----------------------+-------------------| | cg | svn | 7 months ago | 2 | | clang-format | svn | 4 weeks ago | 26 | | color-theme | bzr | 8 years ago | 0 | | confluence | svn | 6 weeks ago | 1 | | darcsum | darcs | 3 years, 4 months ago | 0 | | dic-lookup-w3m | svn | 5 weeks ago | 4 | | dsvn | svn | 6 weeks ago | 1 | | helm-ls-svn | svn | 2 years, 2 months ago | 0 | | ruby-additional | svn | 3 weeks ago | 12 | | tex-smart-umlauts | darcs | 1 year, 4 months ago | 0 | | w3m | cvs | 3 weeks ago | 74 | ... as well as `shimbun', which is part of the `w3m' repository. A more or less up-to-date version of this table can be found at https://emacsmirror.net/stats/melpa.html.

Not having to support five vcs for the benefit of a handful of packages makes it more appealing to improve the remaining code). See #4802.

The upstreams of these packages use some version control system other than Git or Mercurial. As you can see there are very few such packages, which is why support was removed from Melpa (not having to support five vcs for the benefit of a handful of packages makes it more appealing to improve the remaining code). See #4802. Before this commit this was already done for these packages: | Package (2) | Vcs | Last commit | Commits last year | |-------------------+--------+-----------------------+-------------------| | swbuff | cvs | 10 years ago | 0 | | vc-fossil | fossil | 4 weeks ago | 1 | Now we do it for these too: | Package (11) | Vcs | Last commit | Commits last year | |-------------------+--------+-----------------------+-------------------| | cg | svn | 7 months ago | 2 | | clang-format | svn | 4 weeks ago | 26 | | color-theme | bzr | 8 years ago | 0 | | confluence | svn | 6 weeks ago | 1 | | darcsum | darcs | 3 years, 4 months ago | 0 | | dic-lookup-w3m | svn | 5 weeks ago | 4 | | dsvn | svn | 6 weeks ago | 1 | | helm-ls-svn | svn | 2 years, 2 months ago | 0 | | ruby-additional | svn | 3 weeks ago | 12 | | tex-smart-umlauts | darcs | 1 year, 4 months ago | 0 | | w3m | cvs | 3 weeks ago | 74 | ... as well as `shimbun', which is part of the `w3m' repository. A more or less up-to-date version of this table can be found at https://emacsmirror.net/stats/melpa.html.

Not having to support five vcs for the benefit of a handful of packages makes it more appealing to improve the remaining code). See #4802.

tarsius force-pushed the remove-fetchers branch from 4cd60f4 to 4560ece Compare June 14, 2017 23:45

dunn reviewed Jun 14, 2017

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Fuco1 mentioned this pull request Jul 22, 2017

Is there no way not to have to wait ~3 hours for a build? #4280

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purcell mentioned this pull request Sep 9, 2017

Drop support for rarely used sources #4798

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tarsius added a commit that referenced this pull request Sep 9, 2017

Remove support for bzr, cvs, darcs, fossil and svn

443104c

Not having to support five vcs for the benefit of a handful of packages makes it more appealing to improve the remaining code). See #4802.

tarsius force-pushed the remove-fetchers branch from 443104c to f3bdf1d Compare September 9, 2017 21:02

tarsius added a commit that referenced this pull request Sep 9, 2017

Remove support for bzr, cvs, darcs, fossil and svn

f3bdf1d

Not having to support five vcs for the benefit of a handful of packages makes it more appealing to improve the remaining code). See #4802.

tarsius force-pushed the remove-fetchers branch from f3bdf1d to 45f7a8d Compare September 10, 2017 07:42

tarsius added a commit that referenced this pull request Sep 10, 2017

Remove support for bzr, cvs, darcs, fossil and svn

58c9353

Not having to support five vcs for the benefit of a handful of packages makes it more appealing to improve the remaining code). See #4802.

tarsius force-pushed the remove-fetchers branch from 58c9353 to 5d50cf1 Compare September 10, 2017 07:46

tarsius added a commit that referenced this pull request Sep 10, 2017

Remove bzr, cvs, darcs, fossil and svn support

5d50cf1

Not having to support five vcs for the benefit of a handful of packages makes it more appealing to improve the remaining code). See #4802.

tarsius added a commit to melpa/package-build that referenced this pull request Sep 10, 2017

Remove bzr, cvs, darcs, fossil and svn support

782bed9

See melpa/melpa#4802.

tarsius mentioned this pull request Sep 10, 2017

Remove bzr, cvs, darcs, fossil and svn support melpa/package-build#8

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tarsius changed the title ~~Remove support for bzr, darcs, and fossil fetchers; prepare removal of cvs and svn fetchers~~ Remove bzr, cvs, darcs, fossil and svn support Sep 10, 2017

tarsius force-pushed the remove-fetchers branch from 5d50cf1 to 894b301 Compare September 11, 2017 11:51

tarsius added a commit that referenced this pull request Sep 11, 2017

Remove bzr, cvs, darcs, fossil and svn support

894b301

Not having to support five vcs for the benefit of a handful of packages makes it more appealing to improve the remaining code). See #4802.

tarsius force-pushed the remove-fetchers branch from 894b301 to d4bd6d5 Compare September 13, 2017 21:21

tarsius added a commit that referenced this pull request Sep 13, 2017

Remove bzr, cvs, darcs, fossil and svn support

d4bd6d5

Not having to support five vcs for the benefit of a handful of packages makes it more appealing to improve the remaining code). See #4802.

tarsius closed this Sep 18, 2017

tarsius deleted the remove-fetchers branch September 18, 2017 16:37

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tarsius reopened this Sep 19, 2017

tarsius force-pushed the remove-fetchers branch from d4bd6d5 to 390e9f7 Compare September 19, 2017 07:45

tarsius added a commit that referenced this pull request Sep 19, 2017

Remove bzr, cvs, darcs, fossil and svn support

390e9f7

Not having to support five vcs for the benefit of a handful of packages makes it more appealing to improve the remaining code). See #4802.

tarsius added 2 commits September 19, 2017 09:46

Remove bzr, cvs, darcs, fossil and svn support

742b7ae

Not having to support five vcs for the benefit of a handful of packages makes it more appealing to improve the remaining code). See #4802.

tarsius force-pushed the remove-fetchers branch from 390e9f7 to 742b7ae Compare September 19, 2017 07:46

tarsius mentioned this pull request Sep 19, 2017

Almost remove Emacswiki support melpa/package-build#9

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purcell merged commit 30de78c into master Sep 30, 2017

purcell mentioned this pull request Sep 30, 2017

Remove all Emacswiki packages #5008

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Remove bzr, cvs, darcs, fossil and svn support #4802

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		@@ -802,10 +583,6 @@ Optionally PRETTY-PRINT the data."
		"--exclude=.svn"
		"--exclude=CVS"

Remove bzr, cvs, darcs, fossil and svn support #4802

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