Hosting repos that are not upstream

[Jim Meyering]

Hi,

FYI, for the last week or so I've been mirroring-to-git a couple of
sourceware-hosted CVS repositories:

    http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.device-mapper.devel/3758

Why?  In case it's not obvious (beyond the dVCS distributed vs.
non-distributed argument): you can do a lot of things so much more
efficiently using Git than with CVS, that this effort has been well worth
my time, if only in removing frustration with CVS :-)  For example,
now I no longer have to endure cvs-diff's network-related delays.
Same for annotating and searching logs or old deltas.

Since a few people on those two projects said they too
would appreciate a public git mirror, I went ahead and
published my repository and polished the script to keep
things synchronized via cron.

For those using a CVS repository, getting to know their code through
a read-only Git mirror is a good introduction to using a better version
control system.  Providing a service like this to arbitrary projects might
have few down sides (increase disk use, true, but no need to backup, since
the mirror is effectively read-only; also, note that in my experience,
the Git repository is usually only about 20-25% the size of the CVS
repository).  But I think there are more pros than cons.  There might
even be a net decrease in bandwidth requirements when providing a git
mirror of a fedora-hosted CVS repository, since the git protocol is so
much more efficient.

The bits of infrastructure I use to mirror those two repositories (as
well as emacs and gnulib at savannah) are general enough that it is now
trivial for me to mirror more on git.et.redhat.com.  However, providing
a fedora-sponsored service like this would be better for several reasons:

    - better (and "official") support
    - it's best to keep the mirrored-to Git repo as near as possible to the
       CVS repository (efficiency and security), so for CVS-based Fedora-
       hosted projects, it's best if any Git mirror is also Fedora-hosted.
    - more visibility, good PR for Fedora
    - help introduce people to distributed version control

Feedback welcome (feel free to tell me that I'm crazy and you hate Git --
you won't be the first :-)

Jim