CVS import process not very resilient to transient errors

[Samuel Bronson]

Observe the logs of the first two attempts to import the present lp:~naesten/ucon64/trunk (there was previously another vcs-import branch there, which is now named lp:~naesten/ucon64/trunk-broken):

http://launchpadlibrarian.net/70603201/naesten-ucon64-trunk.log
http://launchpadlibrarian.net/70612269/naesten-ucon64-trunk.log

In particular, note that both runs ended with the same type of error, but on different files. In fact, it seems that the second attempt died much earlier on, in a file/revision that had been fetched succussfully in the first attempt!

Such hickups are probably unnavoidable with a system like CVS, so it would probably be wise to make the import process tolerate such errors (at small rates, at least) and just retry a bit later; an appropriate retry interval would probably be somewhere between a few seconds and a few minutes.

Alternatively, perhaps the CVS import process could be made a bit more incremental, so that even if such errors would halt the import process, the next import could start approximately where the failing one left off, like bzr-svn can already do with SVN imports?

[Robert Collins (lifeless)]

We're not currently working on this area of LP. If someone wants to improve it we'd love patches and be delighted to mentor folk.