[rancid] CVS web viewer?

[Riku Meskanen]

Hello,

> On 22 Feb 2024, at 01:48, Anson Maddock <Anson.Maddock at gmx.com> wrote:
> 
> ViewVC 1.3 (bleeding-edge) has support for python 3 if you would like to continue using it.
> In the 10+ years I've been using Rancid I've used CVS, SVN, and GIT. If you have the time, I would migrate to using GIT. We've used GITLIST and GITLAB for displaying changes. This also allows you to have a local set of the backups on a laptop with little to no effort and they are updated automatically. You can also commit updates to the router.db this way as well. 

Those are really good points for GIT & gitlab, but I've got one gripe with GIT web-frontends. 

That is with comparing any two random commits tend to be quite hard with them or with some appears not even been implemented at all.

And I've tried cgit, gitweb, gitlab and in past even gitorius and all have same issue which made me switch back to CVS. I don't have clue why, but could be that devs don't use or need that feature that often. It's implementation is therefore been overlooked and development resources used something else.

I've used git quite long time for anything else and for me comparing two commits is no brainer, but those who do not write code and are less convenient with using git with plain cli find comparing more challenging and when I asked which was preferred CVS with cvsweb was clear winner.

We have quite long history with rancid, since 2004 and it's mostly been working fine -- just some perl & tcl/expect local hacks been done over years and ported forward, but not regarding cvsweb. 

I don't exactly recall any more why cvsweb was then chosen, possibly it was first we tried and setup was easy, did what was needed and nobody gave second thought for a long time -- before GIT became hip new tool.

As git became more popular I tested git with varying results described above and went back to cvsweb and since it's been working without problems ever since I've just continued to keeping it chugging. It's been run now on latest debian (12.5) had no issues with updates from 9.x and before that it was on RedHat distros. Coming summer will become 20 years using rancid & cvsweb :)

OK, that was perhaps way too long rant, but my point is if you don't need casual network engineers on their own and without willingness to use git cli to compare random commits, then I would prefer git. But if you need to get comparing those random commits for less cli experienced users check that the web front end is useable for those who need it and if not that cvsweb might be easiest solution however it's appearance isn't quite up to date what some people might expect.

Cheers,

:-) riku

-- 
Riku Meskanen
University of Jyväskylä
Digital services
email: riku.h.meskanen at jyu.fi