Re: Proposal: Switch back to savannah using GIT

[Gregory Casamento]

If the consensus is to move to github, then that work is basically already done.   The github mirror is a full mirror of all of the code in subversion.   I agree with David.  Where we are hosted is extremely important since it has everything to do with visibility.

The only problem I am seeing with moving is that we may lose some existing contributors or, at least, piss off some existing contributors if we do make a move to github.   Additionally, as one might predict, the FSF doesn't like github.   So a move to github not only amounts to a move of repos, but I'm afraid it's also the equivalent of a fork which is not something I'm opposed to talking about.

GC

On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 4:42 AM David Chisnall <address@hidden> wrote:

On 29 May 2015, at 00:27, Stefan Bidigaray <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> So, reading everyone's reply I get the impression that feel that GIT really isn't all that great if you're not using it with a more powerful host like GitHub.  Is this true?  I've only ever used SVN and CVS, and only ever committed to GNUstep, so my experience here is very limited.  My only opinion here is that if we're going to move to a new versioning systems, that we move to at least a more powerful one.  I like how simple SVN is (it doesn't get any easier than 'svn co svn://svn.gna.org/svn/gnustep/modules/dev-libs'), but understand that it comes at a price.  Learning a new, more powerful tool is not a problem but learning a new, more complicated tool that offers the same or less capabilities will be very frustrating.

Git certainly benefits from good tools.  GitX on OS X is very nice for preparing commits and browsing the history (a GNUstep port would be nice…), but it doesn’t necessarily need all of the infrastructure of a decent host.

I use git with personal repos that I host myself (I migrated these all from svn recently - backups are now easier, as git clone is easier to work with than svnsync), some hosted by our university hosting service (pretty bare bones) and GitHub.  There are several advantages of GitHub:

- Integrated code review tools (I can’t understate how valuable these are)

- Integration with CI systems (Étoilé uses the GitHub-provided Travis CI)

- A real community of potential new developers.   I’ve had patches sent to me via GitHub on some projects that I created for personal use and never publicised.  Again, I can’t understate how important this is.

- A choice of VCSs with the same repo (I can do svn co of my GitHub repos, if I want).

- Automatic tarball generation.  When I’m packaging a project for FreeBSD, it makes me very happy to learn that it’s hosted on GitHub, because if I know the release branch name or hash I can automatically generate a URL that is a tarball of the sources and tell the port to grab that for building.  When I’m doing a release of something GitHub-hosted, then it’s trivial: create a tag and you’re done.  We’ve recently moved the public CHERI repo to GitHub precisely because it’s the easiest way of generating tarballs from a repo.

- Integrated bug tracker (as in, properly integrated - I can close bugs from commit messages, they’re not just hosted in the same place) and wiki.

- Web hosting with Jekyll support.  Jekyll generates static HTML from a set of transforms and is the perfect CMS for web sites stored in a VCS.  I’m now using it for my own stuff, with some of it hosted on GitHub and some not.

> As for the move to Savannah, I think it's been long overdue.  It has offered everything GNUstep needs for quite a long time.  And having all the development stuff (bug tracker, source code, etc) in one place has some obvious advantages.  That being said, if we move to another source code hosting site, lets pick one that can also serve all out needs instead of trying to piecemeal it ourselves.

If what GNUstep needs is a host that most potential developers don’t have an account on (and won’t think to look at), conveys the impression that we’re a dead project, and adds more barriers to entry for new developers then, indeed, Savannah does everything that GNUstep needs.

David




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