Re: DVCS

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Tue, 2008-10-28 at 17:45 -0500, Shaun McCance wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-10-28 at 23:23 +0100, BJörn Lindqvist wrote:
> > Hello,
> > 
> > 2008/10/28 Mikael Hallendal <micke imendio com>:
> > > I can't really see us coming to a consensus on this topic. Even after a vote
> > > we would have people continuing to use Bazaar if Git win and vice verse.
> > > GNOME is by nature a distributed project with a lot of sub modules,
> > > maintainers and thus preferences.
> > 
> > I think that is doubtful. Most people do not care what VCS GNOME uses.
> > For those who care, and like DVCS, their opinions are probably
> > something like this:
> > 
> > svn 10 points
> > git 100 +/- 5 points
> > hg 100 +/- 5 points
> > bzr 100 +/- 5 points
> > 
> > That is, it doesn't really matter what DVCS GNOME uses. They are all
> > great systems, all superior to svn. There _may_ be people who have
> > their favorite DVCS and would be deeply unhappy if their alternative
> > didn't win, but I think they are in a very (very) small minority, if
> > they even exists. I think keeping the GNOME developer environment
> > coherent is much more important than appeasing to individuals
> > preferences.
> > 
> > Just have a vote about it. Voting is fun, encourages participation and
> > involvement, so make as many people eligible as possible.
> 
> Why don't we put out a preliminary, non-binding poll to
> all active account holders?  Something like this:
> 
>   Stuff I actively do (check all that apply):
>   [ ] Active development of some set of modules
>   [ ] Cherry-picking bug fixing on lots of modules
>   [ ] Usability work on lots of modules
>   [ ] Accessibility work on lots of modules
>   [ ] Documentation
>   [ ] Translation
> 
>   My take on VCS for Gnome:
>   ( ) Keep svn
>   ( ) Switch to git
>   ( ) Switch to bzr
>   ( ) Switch to hg
>   ( ) Switch to anything distributed
>   ( ) I just don't care
>   ( ) Can I have cvs back please?
> 
> The first question allows us to look at the numbers
> for interesting cross-sections of our contributors.
> Maybe there are other questions that would give us
> some meaningful breakdowns.

This sounds like a good idea to me. Just poll all people with svn
access; people who haven't committed in years will largely self-select
out anyways. 

Might be interesting to ask about level familiarity and/or use of
different systems as well.

Question for gnome-infrastructure: How do we move forward on it? Do we
have an easier alternative at hand then just writing low-tech one off
application? 

- Owen