Although I don't have the karma, I'll take the fallout and flak for coming up with the idea (although not the initial objection) that was raised for changing the repository's name from httpd-2.0 to httpd.
A couple folks have suggested we shouldn't use a branch for various reasons. I mildly to strongly disagree with the reasons given. Centralizing the history into a single repository is massive goodness. Yes, with cvs this isn't an optimal and performant solution, but it has worked just fine for Tomcat. We aren't speaking of multiple oodles of branches, only one every blue moon (every six months to a year, perhaps.) If and when we convert to SVN, and the branch conversion bug is addressed and long gone, the entire history of the project since 2.0.0 will be available in a single place for all to review. That, I believe, is goodness. So, I then realized how badly this f*s things up without advance notice and consideration to all the places (cvs commit messages, viewcvs, et al) and folks (with active checkouts) that need to prepare for the change. So thank you Roy for flipping the switch back to 'normal' operations. So, proceeding on the idea that 2.X lives in a single repository, (which was voted for a month with absolute concensus) where can we go from here, and how do we have to prepare? Obviously, infrastructure needs to be involved, including apmail, viewcvs, and other things I don't recognize at the moment. End users need time to update their cvs checkouts to the new canonical location. Lets say 45 days from the beginning of the changeover, with a headline in the top level httpd.apache.org index.html and details in /dev/. So when we begin the changeover, how do we avoid becoming hopelessly confused? I believe we begin with warning commiters about 15 days before, then 5, then 2, then 1 day before the change. On that day, httpd-2.0 becomes httpd. All cvs apmail and viewcvs resources are redirected at that time. httpd-2.0 becomes a module alias, WITH NO COMMIT PRIVILAGES for any users. This way we don't have some scattershot history of httpd-2.0 and httpd commits. Now, only committers were affected by that change, because everyone can still check out httpd-2.0. Now over the next month and a half, we encourage folks who follow the news that the repository name has changed. We encourage them to change over in a short time, just as our friends in Europe had to exchange their money not so long ago. Finally (before 2.2, certainly) this change becomes effective. The alias to httpd-2.0 cvs repository disappears. Users scrambling to find out what broke should be greeted again at httpd.apache.org/ and /dev/ to news of how to fix it. Ken's change for htdocs was really a pita because existing checkouts were simply broken. This isn't the case for this schema. You update when you need to commit (and the system's informed you you cannot commit.) Planned chaos rather than unanticipated chaos. Folks, any other observations besides apmail, viewcvs and the other aspects we must consider before we contemplate a rename? Bill
