Dear LinuxBIOS community,
most of you might not have noticed, but we've had quite adventurous times during the last five months. The whole story started around February, when LinuxBIOS decided to go away from Sourceforge's CVS repository. CVS does not support restructuring code very well, and Sourceforge sometimes had delays of a week before changes would be visible to the world. That's why we moved on to a more modern version control system: GNU arch.
While conceptionally very advanced, GNU arch also brought some issues and required hefty efforts. While concepts and architecture are important, usability and maturity is still a major concern with GNU arch.
Since the Open Source/Free Software Firmware community wins nothing when we all advance to version control experts but stick with administrative issues, we decided to go to a mature system that combines modern version control techniques with a steep learning curve, making it a lot easier for everyone to have a look at LinuxBIOS development, or contribute: Subversion
I've been migrating the LinuxBIOS repository to Subversion now. We have been testing it for the the last month now and it has been a good deal more reliable and usable than GNU arch.
By tonight the GNU arch repository is read only and will not accept new checkins.
Here's a quick introduction how the LinuxBIOS repository can be accessed from now on:
Anonymous access ----------------
You can check it out as follows: $ svn co svn://openbios.org/repos/trunk/LinuxBIOSv2 or $ svn co svn://openbios.org/repos/trunk/LinuxBIOSv1
Developer Access ----------------
Access for developers is very similar to anonymous access. Just add your Subversion username as follows when checking out the repository:
$ svn co svn://<username>@openbios.org/repos/trunk/LinuxBIOSv2
All people with checkin permission to the GNU arch repository will be contacted shortly to move their accounts over to Subversion (Many of them are already). If you are a LinuxBIOS developer and don't hear from me, please contact me.
Source code browsing --------------------
You can also browse the LinuxBIOS Subversion repository online:
http://www.openbios.org/viewcvs/trunk/
Snapshots ---------
If you don't want to use Subversion, or can't use it, you can also download a tar ball of the latest repository at
http://www.openbios.org/viewcvs/trunk/LinuxBIOSv2.tar.gz?view=tar
More information on Subversion ------------------------------
Subversion is available as a package in all major Linux distributions. It can also be compiled from source code on most available systems.
See the Subversion homepage http://subversion.tigris.org/ for more information on Subversion, including a description of available commands and the source code.
There's also a very detailed online book available on Subversion: Version Control with Subversion - http://svnbook.red-bean.com/
The Subversion user interface is very similar to the CVS one, so if you have used CVS before, it will be easy for you to use it and participate in the LinuxBIOS project.
Comments, flames, questions are very welcome.
Best regards, Stefan Reinauer