Re: On git.gnome.org and gitorious

[Frederic Peters <fpeters gnome org>]

Bastien Nocera wrote:

> If we were to change the infrastructure we use for hosting git trees,
> we'd need something more concrete than "wouldn't it be nice". Please
> give us a list of advantages, changes, potential pitfalls, pricing, etc.
> For example, why gitorious and not github?

This is just following the Git migration plan layed out a few years
ago, why was it already suggested back then? Why didn't it happen?
Why are designers not using our infrastructure? Why do developers have
to host their personal branches elsewhere?

I do believe the questions are interesting even without detailed
answers, I'll try to give some answers but this is certainly not
something than can be done for every details all by myself, after all
I am not one of the designers, I do not have an extensive use of git
branches, I never installed Gitorious, I do not know the precise
configuration of our current Git setup, etc.

The major advantage, the reason why I brought the topic, would of
course to have GNOME contributors served adequately by the GNOME
infrastructure, to get back to actual comments, this would mean easy
creation of personal branches and fine grained permission management.

Changes? I guess we will want to have a single web interface, meaning
that we will want to retire cgit, but at first it would be possible to
have both in parallels. I am of the opinion that the current cgit
layout is not optimal, look at http://git.gnome.org/browse/jhbuild/
and you get to scroll down one page to get past long obsolete branches
and a list of version numbers. Dealing with repositories as we do
today, pushing and pulling with ssh wouldn't be affected.

A potential pitfall? I have no idea how Gitorious would integrate with
the way we manage accounts in LDAP, and how we'd want it to integrate
even. A possible idea would be doing it like alioth.debian.org does
it, the actual Debian developers are taken from LDAP while other users
can create accounts that won't get past the frontier of that service.

Pricing? Initially I thought we'd be short of capable persons, and
we'd have to resort to hiring someone like we did for the bugzilla
upgrade. I would definitely love if it can be done by community
members.

Last but easiest one, Gitorious and not GitHub because Gitorious is
free software.


        Fred