GEOS Git Transition

This page will detail the transition of GEOS from CVS to Git.

Pre-transition activities

Note that some aspects of the transition may be useful artifacts to preserve. The read-only archive of the CVS repo at the very least, but possibly other aspects as well.

Hosting service

Decide on which hosting service to use. Available options are GitHub, NASA internal GitHub (restricted to US citizens), BitBucket, GitLab etc. Also, who will manage this service (NCCS, GMAO,...)

This should be part of the policy document. Though that document probably just needs to state that there will be an officially designated hosting service.

Create policy document

This is mostly on Tom/Arlindo, but are hoping for contributions from Jing and Purnendu.

Discussions with stake-holders in GMAO

The SMT has requested that we come up with a transition plan and bring it back to them. This activity is being led by Arlindo and Tom, and has begun with high-level presentations to the major stakeholders. So far we have covered:

• Ricardo Todling
• Jing Guo
• Purnendu Chakraborty
• Larry Takacs
• Yury Vikhliaev
• Justin Perket

On tap are:

• Andrea Molod
• ?

Accepted without discussion:

• Bill Putman

Obtain official list of historical tags/modules

Nominally this is from Ricardo

Create superDAS CVS module

The thought here is to find a home for existing CVS module work that is not captured by DAS tags. For each DAS tag, there will be an analogous superDAS tag that only differs for files/directories that are not part of DAS.

The SuperDAS module has been created. It should encompass the LDAS, GESOctm, QFED, AGCM, DAS, and the coupled Ocean. The QFED/LDAS/CTM directories are now living under the src directory along side GEOSgcs.

Testing plan

How do we verify that the Git repository has the necessary information. Ideally in some automated fashion.

Day -1

During the lead up to the trigger date, we need to send out frequent reminders to everyone to commit what they can in CVS.

Day 0 steps (in order)

1. Freeze CVS
   • Who can do this? Zed? Arlindo?
2. ???

Discussion/strategies/approaches

Sandbox

It will be important to try out ideas, so we need a simple (possibly slow) mechanism to automatically create a Git repo from the CVS repo. Indeed, this recipe should itself probably be tracked with version control and evolve as we determine the best action. Ideally the steps for Day 0 are then to clone this repo and execute the conversion script. Branches can be used to explore/propose alternate approaches.

In the same vein it might be useful to be able to "clone" the existing CVS repo so that experiments (e.g., creating the "super" DAS CVS module) can be tried and consequences explored. I think that Atanas and I both have permissions to make a deep copy of the repository and put it somewhere accessible on Discover.