Re: GNOME git repositories?

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Wed, 27 Dec 2006, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote:

> Date: Wed, 27 Dec 2006 19:01:36 -0800
> From: Sriram Ramkrishna <sri aracnet com>
> To: "[iso-8859-1] Germ�Po�ama�<gpoo ubiobio cl>,
>      desktop-devel-list gnome org, Kjartan Maraas <kmaraas broadpark no>
> Subject: Re: GNOME git repositories?
>
> On Tue, Dec 26, 2006 at 11:47:38PM +0100, Danilo Šegan wrote:
> > Today at 23:22, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote:
> >
> > > Even better, you don't have to give a cvs/svn account to every
> > > contributor.  Allowing the barrier of entry to be a lot easier.
> >
> > You guys seem to be engaging in the SVN vs. GIT (or any other RCS)
> > again.  I thought that this discussion was over, and I am not getting
> > into it now ;)
>
> Fair enough.  I don't want to interfere with a decision since
> people have taken time and effort to work on the migration.
>
> > I am against having more than one way of accessing source code for
> > GNOME source code.  It's as simple as that.  For the benefit of
> > translators, documentors, artists, and heck, even developers (imagine
> > this: to install GNOME, get gnome-panel using bzr, gtk+ and glib using
> > git, nautilus using SVN, ...).
>
> Well, I don't know about you, but when I build usding jhbuild I do
> seem to have to know about bzr and git since X, cairo and others
> depend on it so it'll probably not happen at least for a developer.
>
> In fact if you switch to git, it's quite likely you only have to
> use only two VCS's, git and bzr.  With only the mono folks having
> to do git/svn/bzr  From documentation,translators and others, it'll
> probably not matter if it's git or svn as long as it's the same
> across all GNOME.
>
> > I am also against GNOME SysAdmin team having to provide for different
> > project hosting services.  But if they feel they can take it, then by
> > all means, be my guests and lets have git.gnome.org and bzr.gnome.org :)
>
> That's something I can understand. :-) Being a sysadmin myself,
> what we can install is what we can support with the man
> power you have.  So if there aren't enough sysadmins to maintain
> multiple VCS then I can understand a single solution.

I hope I'm not the only one to ever submit a few small patches to KDE but
for tasks like documentation and translation I think we would be very
lucky to have people who help us and KDE too, and using Subversion does
have the advantage of being the most mainstream and popular for now.

The difference in syntax may be small for developers, especially
developers who have used more than one version control system but the
difference in syntax is more than enough to trip up hardcoded software,
infrequent developers, or other contributors who really don't enjoy using
the command line.

I hope this move will come as an opportunity for application developer to
abstract out their Revision Control System and make it easier for any
future upgrades to happen without bothering end users as much as this
change will.

I've read descriptions claiming Subversion uses practically identical
syntax to CVS.  Unfortunately practically identical means different,
different enough to break scripts and third party software, and confuse
infrequent contributors.

> In any case, let's just do it.  SVN isn't a bad solution even if I
> think it's anachronistic. :-)  It's a mature VCS and maybe that's
> what we need.  Sometimes we just need to disagree and commit. :-)

I really hope this migration to SVN is successful, and I appreciate the
perseverence of sysadmin team after the other attempts and all the
naysayers (none of whom have volunteered to help the sysadmins but I
suspect many of the same people would cry for patches if criticised in the
same way).  When the migration is complete then we can give a kick in the
pants to any project which doesn't offer a good migration path from
Subversion, preferably with even less breakage and forced relearning for
the most basic features.

-- 
Alan H.