Re: Proposal: an improvement to our Git and tarballs infrastructure

[Andrea Veri <av gnome org>]

2013/4/22 Andre Klapper <ak-47 gmx net>

Thanks for bringing this up.
No strong opinions, more like some side comments:

On Mon, 2013-04-22 at 12:08 +0200, Andrea Veri wrote:
> The real question is: are tarballs really useful in some way? JHBuild
> and the new build.gnome.org based on OSTree don't require tarballs at
> all, they both clone all the needed modules and do the build. I see
> tarballs being useful for distribution's packagers but shouldn't
> cgit's snapshots be enough for that? (this is a new feature I've
> introduced yesterday at git.gnome.org, you can see it in action at
> [1])

What am I supposed to spot / see? And where is the tarball file download
link that I'm looking for? :P

On the link I posted at [1], you should see a 'Downloads' section with three available formats (zip, tar.gz, tar.bz2), just click on them and cgit will build a tarball for you on-the-fly.

 

> The next thing I would like to discuss is what the release team feels
> as a possible improvement for git.gnome.org. Do we need something like
> Gitlab / Gitorious? [2] - [3]

Which *functionality* gains are implied?
I simply don't know exactly what Gitlab / Gitorious offer that you might
see as good reasons to consider them.

Gitlab and Gitorious are complete Git suites (and that actually means: Repositories views, Code reviews, issues, internal wiki) like GitHub for example. The problem I see with them:

1. I've been reported that they are really hard to setup and install

2. We should re-think our ACLs completely, which is not that easy. (Fedora do use Gitolite for managing Git's ACL)

3. Do we really need all the above's functionalities? having another wiki wouldn't help for example.

 

> Do we need a code review tool like Gerrit [4] or Review Board [5]?
> (note that we currently use Owen's splinter on bugzilla for doing
> code / patches reviews)

Splinter on bugzilla.gnome.org has been broken for ages, I always get
"Failed to retrieve attachment 123456" and gave up, though it was nice.

*If* we'd like to bikeshed, err, discuss about moving to a code review
tool, we should define criteria and check other project's evaluations
for the same problem first, e.g. MediaWiki's Gerrit use:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Git/Gerrit_evaluation . LibreOffice and
Eclipse also use Gerrit when I checked a few months ago.
KDE (and Apache) use Review Board but I couldn't find any evaluations
(looks like the KDE Plasma team had started with it even earlier).
For GNOME's historical reasons against reviewboard, see
http://blog.fishsoup.net/2009/09/15/review-board-vs-git-bz/

Honestly I've never used Splinter myself but many people reported it being working pretty good, you might want to poke Owen about that, not sure why that's happening on your side. I agree we should start writing something down on the wiki to discuss the idea to set up a code review tool, the examples you linked are definitely something valuable we could look at while we're discussing the whole proposal.

--
Cheers,

Andrea

Debian Developer,
Fedora / EPEL packager,
GNOME Sysadmin,
GNOME Foundation Membership & Elections Committee Chairman

Homepage: http://www.gnome.org/~av