Archive for December, 2016

Git-cinnabar is a git remote helper to interact with mercurial repositories. It allows to clone, pull and push from/to mercurial remote repositories, using git.

Get it on github.

These release notes are also available on the git-cinnabar wiki.

What's new since 0.4.0rc?

• /!\ Warning /!\ If you have been using a version of the release branch between 0.4.0rc and 0.4.0rc2 (more precisely, in the range 0335aa1432bdb0a8b5bdbefa98f7c2cd95fc72d2^..0.4.0rc2^), and used git cinnabar download and run on Mac or Windows, please run git cinnabar download again with this version and then ensure your mercurial clones have not been corrupted by case-sensitivity issues by running git cinnabar fsck --manifests. If they contain sha1 mismatches, please reclone.
• Updated git to 2.11.0 for cinnabar-helper
• Improvements to the git cinnabar download command
• Various small code cleanups
• Improvement to the experimental support for pushing merges

Cloning Mozilla repositories from scratch with git-cinnabar can be a long process. Grafting them to gecko-dev is an equally long process.

The metadata git-cinnabar keeps is such that it can be exchanged, but it's also structured in a way that doesn't allow git push and fetch to do that efficiently, and pushing refs/cinnabar/metadata to github fails because it wants to push more than 2GB of data, which github doesn't allow.

But with some munging before a push, it is possible to limit the push to a fraction of that size and stay within github limits. And inversely, some munging after fetching allows to produce the metadata git-cinnabar wants.

The news here is that there is now a cinnabar head on https://github.com/glandium/gecko-dev that contains the munged metadata, and a script that fetches it and produces the git-cinnabar metadata in an existing clone of gecko-dev. An easy way to run it is to use the following command from a gecko-dev clone:

$ curl -sL https://gist.github.com/glandium/56a61454b2c3a1ad2cc269cc91292a56/raw/bfb66d417cd1ab07d96ebe64cdb83a4217703db9/import.py | git cinnabar python

On my machine, the process takes 8 minutes instead of more than an hour. Make sure you use git-cinnabar 0.4.0rc for this.

Please note this doesn't bring the full metadata for gecko-dev, just the metadata as of yesterday. This may be updated irregularly in the future, but don't count on that.

So, from there, you still need to add mercurial remotes and pull from there, as per the original workflow.

Planned changes for version 0.5 of git-cinnabar will alter the metadata format such that it will be exchangeable without munging, making the process simpler and faster.