[Bdi4emc-help] Re: subversion etc.

Gene Heskett gene.heskett at verizon.net
Sun Jan 1 01:52:35 CET 2006


On Saturday 31 December 2005 15:02, Kent A. Reed wrote:
>So then Paul replied:
>>Hi Kent & Gene
>>
>>On Thursday 29 December 2005 20:21, Kent A. Reed wrote:
>>>At least on paper, subversion looks great. If Source Forge is going
>>> to migrate to it from CVS, then it sounds like your hand will be
>>> forced soon enough.
>>
>>If the EMC developers decide to switch to subversion, I fear they
>> will be shooting themselves in the collective foot. Quite a few
>> users and developers are running RH-7.x systems, and there are a
>> considerable number of RH-6.x installations to boot. Whilst there
>> are subversion.rpm packages available for RH-7.x, you have to go
>> digging for them. For the many running RH-6.x boxes, I suspect the
>> situation will be much worse.
>
>"Gee,' I thought, "even Cygwin offers subversion, so how hard can
> this be?" Then I did some digging at sourceforge and elsewhere and
> decided you are right. Yikes.

I don't 'do' windows here, so I'm glad you did dig that out.  And 
theres a huge BUT here.  This stuff is designed to work with the 
kernel the developers are using, and AFAIAC, anyone who tries to 
shoehorn this into a different distro is making an extraordinarily 
great effort to shoot them selves, hopefully in the foot but it could 
be worse.

>I'm in agreement with Gene, though. I wouldn't want to let an older
> RH system near the Internet. I guess the folk who do are using
> firewalls and NAT, etc., and hoping that between that and the lesser
> status of Linux vis-a-vis Windows, hackerwise, they'll achieve
> "security through obscurity." My experience at work, where we have
> something on the order of 10000 computers and pretty good resident
> packet-police, suggests this approach isn't good enough, but
> everyone has to do the cost/benefit analysis for their own
> situation. Maybe I lean too heavily toward security because I've had
> too much experience cleaning infected machines.

My experience is only on one machine, which, just to be absolutely 
obnoxious about it, Jim and I were determined to do the cleanup 
without an additional reboot over and above the one that killed the 
rooters access before he had cleaned up his tracks, or had established 
a solid access to it. It took us about 2 days before we were sure 
we'ed got it all, and we used every trick in the book to flush out the 
rooters work.  With a ups on it, that mail server ran for another 6 
years before something on the mobo upchucked & we had to rebuild the 
server on another box.  The rooter knocked on the door several times, 
but by then I'd installed portsentry and made it totally paranoid, so 
we just disappeared from his radar regardless of where he came in 
from.

>>I've not done any significant work with the old EMC tree for the
>> best part of two years now. Most of my efforts have been in a
>> branch of emc2 - The EMC version found on the BDI-4 disk is the
>> result. Although both head and bdi-4 branches share much code in
>> common, most of the user space code is identical, as are core parts
>> of the RT modules, the bdi-4 branch does not use the HAL layer.
>> Think of the BDI-4 build as a staging platform for the time when
>> (if ?) emc2 becomes stable enough for widespread use. Although from
>> what I hear, emc3 may be just round the corner.
>
>And the payoff for me is that you've already done this so I don't
> have to, just as you've already worked out the details for merging
> the  RTAI with the Debian distribution. One of life's lessons for me
> has been to stop saying immediately "I can do that" and start asking
> "who's done it" so I don't have to.
>
>When I made my comment, I wasn't thinking about the different
> branches, only about EMC vs EMC2 as nominally fixed vs. still
> evolving applications. I confess it isn't clear to me what achieving
> a stable EMC2 would mean for the BDI. Do you mean you could retire
> all EMC1-specific code and build EMC2 strictly from the sourceforge
> head branch, and/or something else?

I just built emc2 from the cvs, current "checkout emc2 emc2" as of this 
afternoon my time, and while there were a couple of surprises (things 
got moved), it ran just fine for what I needed to do, which was carve 
out of white pine, a frame to go around a 4 gang light switch to cover 
the fact that the electrickery installer, left the whole box proud of 
the wall, every box he touched, by about 7/16".  Dumb...

>I really like the people who are developing EMC, but your last two
>sentences in the above quote worry me. I've been involved in a number
> of major IT standards developments where core developers could not
> resist starting a new version before the ink was dry on the current
> version's release candidate (futureware is always more fun than
> presentware). As long as the EMC developers continue to use their
> evolving product to make chips fly, this probably will be ok, but if
> they let the perfect become the enemy of the good, it could end
> badly. The marginalization of the perfect ISO/OSI communications
> protocols by the wart-covered TCP/IP protocols is a good example of
> what I mean.

AFAICT, they all make chips fly too.  And this is a Good Thing(TM) when 
you have talented people who can carve both code and steel.

>Regards,
>Kent
>
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-- 
Cheers, Gene
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