Re: DVCS

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad behdad org>]

Owen Taylor wrote:
> 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. 

Interesting that you bring it up.  We were talking about this at Speck
Hackfest last week and we came to the same conclusion, and I added to my TODO
list to do a poll of all active committers when I get back.

> 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? 

I was thinking that we can either use the Election Committee's facilities, or
use one of the freely available polling websites.

> - Owen


behdad