# -*- mode: indented-text -*- # # Author: Artem Belevich # # (Changes have been made to Artem's original doc, as things evolve.) # # ********************************************************************** As it's said in README "This is not very well packaged code. It's not packaged at all. Don't come here expecting something you plop in a directory, twiddle a few things, and you're off and using it. Much work has to be done to get there." This file is intended to make some things *easier* but not easy. You are still required to make some changes on your own. There is no guaranteed solution yet and it's unlikely that there will be one in the nearest future. ********************************************************************** 0. OVERVIEW Some time ago I've seen Linux Source Navigator (LSN) at http://sunsite.unc.edu/linux-source. I was impressed. It was and is a wonderful tool to explore Linux kernel source code. Then Mozilla.org came up with a more elaborate tool that includes source browser with crossreferencing (LXR http://lxr.linux.no) and CVS tree control (Bonsai - http://www.mozilla.org/bonsai.html). While LXR formatting is not as pretty as LSN's one, it has a huge advantage - it lets you see where the identifier is defined and used. And Bonsai brings nice and easy (though sometimes incompatible with browsers other but Netscape's own) interface to the CVS history. This includes getting list of changes, diffs between revisions, etc. All in all LXR+Bonsai+other stuff beneath is a useful tool capable of handling huge projects. It's not that easy to make it work with other source tree but Mozilla's own but it's possible. And there are a lot of things to improve. Now I'm going to concentrate on the first goal - to make it work. 1. GETTING IT UP First of all you have to get all the tools in mozilla's mozilla/webtools CVS repository. This includes lxr,bonsai,registry and tinderbox. You're likely will not need neither tinderbox but get it just in case. To get the sources you have to follow instructions on http://www.mozilla.org/bonsai.html. OK, now you've got the sources but don't rush to try it right away. It's likely that you will not be able to even start most of the scripts. There are more things you will have to get and install. The short list of the things you will need: 1) MySQL database server. 2) Perl 5.004+ with Mysql module (included with MySQL). 3) Date::Parse module for Perl 4) Some kind of HTTP server so you could use CGI scripts You could try running the ./configure script to see what tools it complains about right now. Mind you, it won't check for the MySQL database. 1.1 Getting and setting up MySQL database Visit MySQL homepage at http://www.tcx.se and grab the latest stable binary release of the server. Sure, you can get sources and compile them yourself, but binaries are the easiest and the fastest way to get it up and running. Follow instructions found in manual. There is a section about installing binary-only distributions. You should create database bonsai. It may be a good idea to make it writable by all users on your machine and change access level later. This would save you a lot of time trying to guess whether it's permissions or a mistake in the script that make things fail. 1.2 Perl + Mysql You will need Perl 5.004 with DB and Mysql extensions. DB is required to use LXR browser and crossreferencer for storing its database. Mysql is used by Bonsai. If you have Perl already installed, try to run genxref program from LXR suite. If it complains that it misses DB terribly then you're probably will have to get and install DB 1.86 distribution from one of the CPAN (www.cpan.org) mirrors in src/misc directory. I personally got it from http://www.cpan.org/src/misc/db.1.86.tar.gz. Having DB compiled and installed you will also have to rebuild and reinstall Perl itself so It would recognize and compile DB module in. This can be tricky if you have DB installed in some strange place as I did. I've got an error during linking phase - there was a function missing in hash/ndbm.c file, so I just commented it out. It may potentially cause troubles, but I think it does not matter in our case as this was intended only for DBM compatibility - the feature we don't really use. Now you hopefully have Perl + DB compiled installed and working. Time to set up Mysql module. This one is easy. Just follow instructions in MySQL manual. You have to read manuals sometimes.. I think I'm getting older.. 8-) Next step is to get TimeDate module from one of the CPAN mirrors. Go to CPAN search page (http://theory.uwinnipeg.ca/search/cpan-search.html) and search for the "TimeDate" module. Then get it and install. You also need to get the libnet and MailTools CPAN modules. They can both be found on CPAN at CPAN/modules/by-authors/id/GBARR. 1.3 HTTP server You have a freedom of choice here - Apache, Netscape or any other server on UNIX would do. The only thing - to make configuration easier you'd better run HTTP daemon on the same machine that you run MySQL server on. Make sure that you can access 'bonsai' database with user id you're running the daemon with. 2. TWEAKING THE TOOLS Now you should have all necessary tools to be able to run LXR and Bonsai scripts and see why the wouldn't work for you right now. 2.1 LXR The first thing to set up is LXR tool. All it needs is the source tree (not CVS tree). It's relatively easy and works almost right of the box. Follow instructions in LXR README file. Having set LXR you will see that regardless what your source tree contains you will see that everything refers to it as Mozilla. Mozilla is a great thing and this tool was primarily tailored to mozilla tree but you'd like to control your own tree. First step is to edit your Here is the short list of changes I had to make file: ident 1) change "&root=/cvsroot" to your CVSROOT path 2) change "file=/mozilla/" to the directory under CVSROOT where your sources are. In my case it is just "/" file: index.html Nothing vital here but probably worth changing to reflect your own environment file: lxr.conf Changes to this file are described in LXR README file and are quite simple. file: source You may find it useful to uncomment "$img = "/icons/..." lines if you use Explorer as it does not have internal-gopher-* images built in. Actually Bonsai contains a lot of netscapism that will make your IE4 unhappy anyway. You'd better stick with Netscape if you are going to use LXR/Bonsai file: template-* Here you will probably want to watch closely at the places whare you see the word 'mozilla' near '.cgi'. There are a lot of mozilla-specific paths hardcoded change/get rid of banner that loads straight from mozilla.org that may be very dangerous if you're working for micro$oft and your boss comes by.. 8-) 2.2 Bonsai This stuff sometimes gets very specific about your CVS repository setup. You have to make a lot of changes until more portable configuration mechanism is introduced. These steps should create a basic Bonsai install: ./configure make install You might want to give the option --prefix= to configure to install Bonsai in another place than /usr/local, e.g. /var/www. It will make a new directory named "bonsai" in the prefix directory you specify. Edit data/treeconfig.pl file as described in README file. Create appropriate data/XXX directory for each tree XXX you've configured in 'treeconfig.pl'. Go to the data directory and run trapdoor >data/passwd it will set up admin's password. That's basically it. With some luck and persistence you will have 90% working system at this point. A lot of these things are just asking to be fixed in near feature. And I hope they will be. 3. Setting up database This is quite simple but time consuming operation. First create database structure using maketable.sh script. You might want to edit it to use the user and password you want for the bonsai database. Then go to Bonsai administration page and press "Rebuild CVS history" button. Then you may go to the theater and watch a movie or two. It will talke a lot of time. It takes several seconds to process one file. The more revisions in file the more time it will take. My SUN workstation with 2x200Mhz UltraSPARC processors run about an hour to process about 4K files with 20K+ revisions. Your mileage may vary. Copy "dolog.pl" to your CVSROOT directory, and check it in. Add "dolog.pl" to CVSROOT/checkoutlist, and check it in. Then, add a line to your CVSROOT/loginfo file that says something like: ALL $CVSROOT/CVSROOT/dolog.pl -r /cvsroot bonsai-checkin-daemon@my.bonsai.machine Replace "/cvsroot" with the name of the CVS root directory, and "my.bonsai.machine" with the name of the machine Bonsai runs on. Now, on my.bonsai.machine, add a mail alias so that mail sent to "bonsai-checkin-daemon" will get piped to handleCheckinMail.tcl. The first argument to handleCheckinMail.tcl is the directory that bonsai is installed in. E.g. in /etc/aliases, add bonsai-checkin-daemon: "|/usr/local/bonsai/handleCheckinMail.pl /usr/local/bonsai" or whatever is appropriate for your mail transport agent. 4. Things to do a) There should be better way to track CVS tree changes. Now it's done by making CVS send e-mail about each checkin. (See the comments at the top of dolog.pl for some clues.) One alternative theory would be to take advantage of the CVS history command, which provides all necessary information to get list of files recently commited, so there is no need to send/process email. Just set up a cron job that will periodically look for CVS tree changes and update database. On the other hand, it's not at all clear how efficient the cvs history command is for large, active repositories. b) Better configuration. One should not hardcode CVS tree <-> Source tree translations. Another thing to configure - banners. c) LXR could be improved in a number of ways. Using MySQL database instead of DB would probably be a good idea. It's unclear what impact it will have on performance though. Incremental database updates would be nice. It might be also nice to borrow syntax highliting from LSN. 5. Conclusion. OK. This may or may not work for you. But I hope you had a great time trying. Or just reading. Any suggestions/additions are welcome.