Re: Heads up: Geary mainline development branch renamed to `mainline`

[Ask Hjorth Larsen <asklarsen gmail com>]

Dear Michael,

Am Mi., 24. Apr. 2019 um 13:17 Uhr schrieb Michael Gratton <mike vee net>:
> Hi Daniel,
>
> On Wed, Apr 24, 2019 at 10:46, Daniel Mustieles García via gnome-i18n
> <gnome-i18n gnome org> wrote:
> > Great, but having modules with no standard name for
> > master/trunk/whatever branch might break applications like Damned
> > Lies, so this rename should be reconsidered, at least until we decide
> > to rename the whole modulesed's master branch to another one.
>
> The name of the mainline branch in git cannot be assumed to be "master"
> since git allows it to be changed, and as of Git 1.8 the server sends
> and the client looks for the name of the mainline branch when the repo
> is being fetched (e.g. via a clone). Changing the name of the mainline
> branch is easy to do, and in fact our Gitlab instance lets anyone with
> appropriate privs for a project do just that from the project settings
> UI.
>
> So, Damned-Lies' current behaviour is broken because it makes the
> assumption that the mainline branch is always named "master" (after
> trying a few other hard-coded names), and so it breaks in situations
> like this. However, I submitted a workaround that adds "mainline" to
> that list, and that MR[0] has been merged. I'm not sure if it has been
> deployed, but I think it may have been about a week ago.
>
> Of course, this should be fixed properly to just ask the repo what the
> right name is, and if there's interest in fixing it properly I'll
> happily look into it and submit another MR. I've also worked with
> Andrea to fix places in the sysadmin code (git hooks, GitLab
> integration, etc) making the same assumption[1], and that's been
> working fine for weeks.
>
> Anyway, it should be fixed for Geary now, so if you're still having
> problems with this as of this time last week, please let me know so I
> can look into a fix.
>
> > What would happen if every module maintainer decides to rename it's
> > master branch? It will be a mess... I just think we should keep names
> > homogeously, don't mind if it's called master, trunk... ;-)
> > >
>
> No, everything will work fine as long as people stop writing code that
> (wrongly) assumes git's mainline branch is necessarily called "master".
> :)

Using different branch names in different GNOME projects is not a
problem for git, which is a computer program, but it is a problem for
humans who need to agree how to do their everyday work.  Spaghetti
code may also happen work and is hence totally valid (or so says the
computer), but most developers reject unreadable code because it is
makes everyday work more difficult and causes more errors to be made
by the humans who work with it.

In this case, we need to work with a lot of different repos and
branches.  There are good technical reasons to make some essential
changes like migrating from svn to git, or moving to Gitlab, but this
change does not give us any technical advantage, it only makes things
less consistent and more time consuming than before.

Best regards
Ask

> //Mike
>
>
> [0] -
> <https://gitlab.gnome.org/Infrastructure/damned-lies/merge_requests/18>
> [1] -
> <https://gitlab.gnome.org/Infrastructure/Infrastructure/issues/127>
>
> --
> ⊨ Michael Gratton, Percept Wrangler.
> ⚙ <http://mjog.vee.net/>
>
>
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