I think if I were to add up all the man hours spent on dealing with Sourceforge CVS by JBoss committers and anonymous accessors alike, we could have probably have achieved a manned space mission to mars, solved world hunger, solved world poverty, and brought peace to the Middle East with time left over for all involved to smoke cigars and drink 100 year-old scotch by the planetary water-cooler (... that's Jamaica, btw). Frankly, its hard to describe the anxiety and nausea I would feel right before having to perform a clean checkout or update, without resorting to profanity and mad tourette's style rants. We're a big company now, so Roy office rants are frowned upon, by some. Hence, the silent scream.

 

Whats the problem with slow CVS access, some may ask... just keep working as it works its magic in the background. Well, it wouldn't be so bad if Intellij IDEA had an "idea" on how to not lock the developer out of all instances of its product while a CVS command is running. For those of you that do not use IDEA, imagine working on JBoss Portal BETA, JBoss Nukes 1.1, and JBoss Portal HEAD, then running an update on JBoss Portal HEAD, and having to sit there for 20 minutes while all 3 instances are frozen in time as you watch the kilobytes *race* across the pipe at a rate of 1 every 10 seconds. Why the Intellij developers didn't think of this, is beyond me and defies logic. Maybe they had a fast pipe to their CVS repository.. who knows? My fellow JBoss developers using Eclipse IDE don't have this problem, and those using command-line CVS commands, avoid the problem with IDE locks altogether.

 

The problem with IDEA would not be even noticeable, if the connection to SourceForge was decent. In a word, it is abysmal during the day. I've found a clever way to get around this by staying up until 11PM EST to perform CVS operations. Okay, so its not clever, but it gets around the problem. A problem that will be a thing of the past.

 

Enter our new JBoss Labs Director, Damon Sicore (http://jboss.org/jbossBlog/blog/dsicore/). As one of his first duties on the job, he's managed to migrate all CVS repositories under JBoss SourceForge Projects to our own internal infrastructure. +1, Damon... he's managed to save anyone dealing with JBoss CVS buckets of time and increase productivity by facilitating this move. Now IDEA locking will be an issue forgotten in the past. Maybe I'll stay with IDEA after all is said and done. ;-)

 

Now begins the task of updating all our docs, wiki articles, forums announcements, etc... to point to our new repository for those wishing to build off of HEAD.

STAY METAL!
Roy Russo