Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad behdad org>]

Andrew Cowie wrote:
> On Sat, 2009-01-03 at 22:46 -0500, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
>> GNOME contributors with an SVN account who had an SSH key installed on
>> their account were invited to fill in the survey.
> 
> [It is NOT my intention to get all negative here; I understand - and
> accept - that projects make decisions and not everyone is happy with
> them. Luckily this decision ultimately is one I can ignore.
> Nevertheless, I have been asked by a number of people to write to this
> thread with why I am so dissatisfied. I do appreciate the effort people
> made, even if I feel that the way the whole survey exercise was
> conducted it was impossible for Git to lose]

I'm offended by this statement.  What do you mean by "the way the whole survey
exercise was conducted it was impossible for Git to lose"?


> Some comments:
> 
> ++
> 
> It's a shame that hackers who contribute to GNOME projects which don't
> use svn.gnome.org were excluded.
> 
>         (I was told their opinions didn't matter. {shrug} that's fine,
>         so long as nobody tries to represent this survey as "what GNOME
>         hackers think")

If anyone represents it as "what GNOME hackers think", it's you.  What I told
you was that because the switch does not affect those other people.  Yes, if
your contributors are NOT committing to GNOME SVN, their opinions doesn't
matter.  Neither does my mom's opinion matter in this case.  Nothing wrong
with that.

> ++
> 
> It was also a shame that I (one who does happen to have a GNOME svn
> account) was not able to complete the survey either because it crashes
> Epiphany when you i) vote for bzr and ii) withhold your vote from git,
> hg, and svn.
> 
>         (When I asked if it might be possible to fix the survey so that
>         GNOME's web browser didn't crash, I was told "known bug" and
>         "too bad, you have to express a preference for Git and Mercurial
>         even if you don't want to". Strange take on democracy. I am
>         rather accustomed to the idea that declining to express a
>         preference for something is an acceptable form of voting.
>         Whatever)

The bug became known only after the survey was started.  I had three options:

  - Recall the survey, fix it, start over.

  - Fix the survey and let those who were affected by it already feel left out.

  - Continue as is.

I chose the last option.

The reason you had to rank all options was not the crasher however.  The crash
was in fact caused by the dialog window asking you to rank all items.  As for
why it required ranking all options, because of the release-team, sysadmin
team, board, and other select individuals who saw the survey before it went
live, none noticed this tiny issue.

But of course you can theorize that it was done to make sure git can't lose.
And indeed when I responded to you explaining this (more briefly, agreed), you
chose not to reply.


> I explicitly did not want to chose Git or Mercurial, because I knew
> exactly what was going to happen. I've heard it several times already in
> #gnome-hackers and elsewhere:
> 
>         "so it seems the people who prefer Bazaar like Git as their
>         second choice, so surely it's ok to go with that. Great!
>         Decision made"
> 
> No. The rest of the survey was irrelevant. It was quite evident that the
> object of the exercise was to allow people to say "lots of people said
> Git was either their first or second choice" which sounds very
> impressive, and was exactly the one thing I did NOT want to support.
> 
> So it crashed my browser. Nice.

Nice theory, yes.  I designed it such that it crashes the browsers of those
who didn't choose git as their favorite.

In reality though, you are pissed off because you wanted to vote strategically
and couldn't.


> ++
> 
> We chose the Bazaar decentralized version control system for our GNOME
> project even before the people behin GNOME's centralized code hosting
> made the courageous and monumental decision to switch from CVS to
> Subversion. Since GNOME didn't offer any way for us to host our
> 'mainline' branch on any official sounding resource, {shrug} we didn't.
> 
> And so we don't.
> 
> And that's actually the only issue that matters so far as I can tell. No
> one can force us to stop using Bazaar. People who work at places like
> Immendio who are using Git to hack on GTK+ cannot be forced to stop git
> either.
> 
> And I wouldn't want them to. They're happy with their tool. We're happy
> with ours.
> 
> When CVS was the only interchange (actually, that's not true, since the
> real interchange for most projects is attachments to Bugzilla of all
> things), then indeed "GNOME switching to Subversion" was a big deal.
> 
> But in the era of distributed version control, the next step really
> matters little. Whatever GNOME _infrastructure_ offers "next" in terms
> of hosting is really quite irrelevant, since quite anyone can host their
> own projects and publish their own branches with nothing more than a
> vanilla web server.
> 
> If the choice had happened to be Bazaar, then we probably would have
> moved our principle copy of our 'mainline' branch there. That would have
> been "nice" but otherwise is inconsequential since hosting the primary
> 'mainline' somewhere else costs us nothing, and I long since offered
> other people accounts to publish their own branches there too. But since
> it's going to be Git, well, it offers nothing for us.
> 
> If the choice had been the other way around, then Git people would
> simply continue to host their branches somewhere else as they already
> area. Again, no change.
> 
> This is ultimately why the whole debate is a bit pointless.
> 
> Regardless, GNOME is not "switching" to anything. If GNOME
> infrastructure is going to offer Git hosting, that's lovely for people
> who chose to use Git as their version control system. {shrug} fine. If
> GNOME infrastructure concurrently disables their Subversion hosting
> and/or people stop pushing their changes there, then that's perhaps a
> bit worse, because it means people in all three systems (+ svn makes
> four) will lose the easy way they have of collaborating. But again,
> whatever.

Yeah, whatever.  I can't care less about what you prefer because you are
already using it and are happy about it.  Keep your personal feelings out of
this thread then and everyone will be the happier.  If others need their
opinions expressed, I think they should do that themselves.


behdad



> ++
> 
> I will close by saying that switching to Bazaar was an unbelievable
> breath of fresh air after so much pain using Git. I wrote about that
> briefly here:
> http://research.operationaldynamics.com/blogs/andrew/software/version-control/git-is-like-cvs.html
> 
> I've been using DVCS systems for a long long time. I have great respect
> for all the groups who have worked on the 3rd generation tools.
> Unfortunately I have no sympathy for Git anymore, and am tired of it
> screwing over people trying to use it. I for one I won't be using Git as
> a client to anything, and if that prevents me from contributing, well,
> that's not anyone's problem but mine.
> 
> Meanwhile, regardless of whatever GNOME infrastructure does, don't think
> you need to use any system other than one you want to for your own work.
> I would encourage you to use Bazaar, but you go right ahead and use
> whatever you want. Open Source is about choice, and in your own work, no
> one can tell you "no".
> 
> You don't need a to use a git.gnome.org just because certain others may
> be doing so, and likewise you don't need to lament a lack of a
> bzr.gnome.org. The choice of tool is up to you, and you can host your
> work anywhere you want. I encourage you to do so.
> 
> $ bzr merge
> 
> AfC
> Sydney