Re: Nmap public source repository now available!

[William McVey <wam () cisco com>]

On Wed, 2006-12-20 at 10:58 -0800, Fyodor wrote:
> There aren't any tags or branches right now.  I do hope to set some
> branches up in /nmap-exp (which doesn't yet exist either) for
> developers as they become necessary.

I want to first say thanks for the repository. I don't want my questions
to be perceived to be critical of the work you put into providing this
service to the nmap user community. I'm simply trying to understand it's
current structure. That being said... I have some questions. :-)

On the topic of tags... Do you plan on using Subversion's tagging (copy)
mechanism to mark repository revisions that are associated with
"official" release versions (including ALPHA, BETA, pre-releases)? One
of the nice things about Subversion is that these tags, although
represented as distinct hierarchies really doesn't use any significant
resources (just a few bytes for bookkeeping). This would allow seeing
what changed between revisions much easier (a simple svn diff of two
hierarchies). It would also facilitate pulling old versions back from
the grave in order to run things like benchmark comparisons and such. I
notice that you indicated in the changelogs when particular releases
were cut. If you wanted, I would be willing to do the legwork of combing
through the archive and copying particular revisions into a 'tag'
hierarchy associated with published releases (I could do my copys into a
developer branch if you'd like).

I'm noticing that history for the nmap hierarchy seems to begin at
revision 2644. If you don't mind me asking, what were you using before
for revision control? If it was RCS or CVS, it may be possible to
integrate that revision history into the repository as well if you
desired. Again, this old history could be added on a custom branch if
you wanted.

Finally, now that we have a live view of the nmap codebase, would you be
interested in setting up a buildbot (http://buildbot.sourceforge.net/)
farm across a variety of platforms for daily build and unit testing? I'm
sure it'd be pretty straightforward to find people willing to contribute
CPU resources to do periodic builds of nmap on a wide variety of
platforms. I could probably offer up at least 8 platforms (latest
Gentoo, 3 versions of Ubuntu, 2 Fedora Core releases, FreeBSD,
OpenSolaris(*)) for building just from my home network...

  -- William

* Most of my available platforms would be running under a Xen hypervisor
kernel, but that shouldn't make too much of a difference in the
building/testing of nmap.

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