subject:"GNOME DVCS Survey Results"

Hi everyone,

Well, let me first say that I'm a bit disappointed at where this thread has
gone so far.  Some of the words passed around we could do without starting a
brand new year.

I want to encourage everyone to stay on topic, so we can actually do
something.  Now, I didn't say so we can make decision, because let me make
it clear if it wasn't, this thread is not about making decisions.  This thread
is about giving those making the decision input they need to consider.  Who
makes the decision?  Those who actually have to implement, oversee, and
maintain any change.  And needless to say, no change will happen unless
someone is willing to JF do it.

From what I understand, so far there has been one proposal, from Olav, who
proposed that he and John implement John's idea of implementing a git-serve
plugin for the bzr repo server.  I think many people pointed out the major
flaws in that scenario.  I want to stress that we should not make the same
mistakes that we blame our downstream distros for making, namely: developing
hacks in house instead of working them out upstream.  Moreover, we should not
get ourselves in another homegrown mess that will need to be maintained for
the years to come.  Look at our bugzilla situation now.  git-serve will be a
bigger issue.

So, here is what I'm bringing to the table:  I'm volunteering to work with
interested fd.o admins and other volunteers to switch GNOME to git.  I need to
first go check to see if I can secure enough time to lead this, and if I can
get enough peoples' attention to make this happen in a timely manner.  I will
make an official proposal when I figure those out.

Emmanuele Bassi wrote:

 [0] I'm reasonably sure it has some. not as the one proposed to avoid
 pissing off somebody somewhere because we want to be inclusive -- no,
 lemme rephrase that: we are *fucking afraid of committment*. seriously:
 an abstraction over DVCS? what have we become? are we *ever* going make
 *any* decision about *anything*? this is actually a larger issue with
 the GNOME community: we are being afraid.

Thanks Emmanuele for bringing this up.  It deserves more than a postscript
spot.  This is a real issue we need to overcome.  At some point, we need to
understand that we can't make everyone happy.  We should aim for making
everyone happy-enough.  And it helps if individuals also understand that it's
not about any single person getting what he wants.  That's exactly why we did
the survey to get an idea of what the community at large prefers.


Cheers, and a late Happy New Year,

behdad
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

Andrew Cowie wrote:
 On Sat, 2009-01-03 at 22:46 -0500, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
 GNOME contributors with an SVN account who had an SSH key installed on
 their account were invited to fill in the survey.
 
 [It is NOT my intention to get all negative here; I understand - and
 accept - that projects make decisions and not everyone is happy with
 them. Luckily this decision ultimately is one I can ignore.
 Nevertheless, I have been asked by a number of people to write to this
 thread with why I am so dissatisfied. I do appreciate the effort people
 made, even if I feel that the way the whole survey exercise was
 conducted it was impossible for Git to lose]

I'm offended by this statement.  What do you mean by the way the whole survey
exercise was conducted it was impossible for Git to lose?


 Some comments:
 
 ++
 
 It's a shame that hackers who contribute to GNOME projects which don't
 use svn.gnome.org were excluded.
 
 (I was told their opinions didn't matter. {shrug} that's fine,
 so long as nobody tries to represent this survey as what GNOME
 hackers think)

If anyone represents it as what GNOME hackers think, it's you.  What I told
you was that because the switch does not affect those other people.  Yes, if
your contributors are NOT committing to GNOME SVN, their opinions doesn't
matter.  Neither does my mom's opinion matter in this case.  Nothing wrong
with that.

 ++
 
 It was also a shame that I (one who does happen to have a GNOME svn
 account) was not able to complete the survey either because it crashes
 Epiphany when you i) vote for bzr and ii) withhold your vote from git,
 hg, and svn.
 
 (When I asked if it might be possible to fix the survey so that
 GNOME's web browser didn't crash, I was told known bug and
 too bad, you have to express a preference for Git and Mercurial
 even if you don't want to. Strange take on democracy. I am
 rather accustomed to the idea that declining to express a
 preference for something is an acceptable form of voting.
 Whatever)

The bug became known only after the survey was started.  I had three options:

  - Recall the survey, fix it, start over.

  - Fix the survey and let those who were affected by it already feel left out.

  - Continue as is.

I chose the last option.

The reason you had to rank all options was not the crasher however.  The crash
was in fact caused by the dialog window asking you to rank all items.  As for
why it required ranking all options, because of the release-team, sysadmin
team, board, and other select individuals who saw the survey before it went
live, none noticed this tiny issue.

But of course you can theorize that it was done to make sure git can't lose.
And indeed when I responded to you explaining this (more briefly, agreed), you
chose not to reply.


 I explicitly did not want to chose Git or Mercurial, because I knew
 exactly what was going to happen. I've heard it several times already in
 #gnome-hackers and elsewhere:
 
 so it seems the people who prefer Bazaar like Git as their
 second choice, so surely it's ok to go with that. Great!
 Decision made
 
 No. The rest of the survey was irrelevant. It was quite evident that the
 object of the exercise was to allow people to say lots of people said
 Git was either their first or second choice which sounds very
 impressive, and was exactly the one thing I did NOT want to support.
 
 So it crashed my browser. Nice.

Nice theory, yes.  I designed it such that it crashes the browsers of those
who didn't choose git as their favorite.

In reality though, you are pissed off because you wanted to vote strategically
and couldn't.


 ++
 
 We chose the Bazaar decentralized version control system for our GNOME
 project even before the people behin GNOME's centralized code hosting
 made the courageous and monumental decision to switch from CVS to
 Subversion. Since GNOME didn't offer any way for us to host our
 'mainline' branch on any official sounding resource, {shrug} we didn't.
 
 And so we don't.
 
 And that's actually the only issue that matters so far as I can tell. No
 one can force us to stop using Bazaar. People who work at places like
 Immendio who are using Git to hack on GTK+ cannot be forced to stop git
 either.
 
 And I wouldn't want them to. They're happy with their tool. We're happy
 with ours.
 
 When CVS was the only interchange (actually, that's not true, since the
 real interchange for most projects is attachments to Bugzilla of all
 things), then indeed GNOME switching to Subversion was a big deal.
 
 But in the era of distributed version control, the next step really
 matters little. Whatever GNOME _infrastructure_ offers next in terms
 of hosting is really quite irrelevant, since quite anyone can host their
 own projects and publish their own branches with nothing more than a
 vanilla web server.
 
 If the choice had happened to be Bazaar, then we probably would

Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-06 Thread Edward Hervey

On Mon, 2009-01-05 at 16:41 +, Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro wrote:
  
 
 Heh, thanks a lot.  This looks nice.  Nicer than the one in gnulib that
 Rui Tiago pointed out.  Although I must say not as nice as my 'gnulog'
 bazaar log formatter plugin.. ;-)  But I guess good enough that I'd be
 comfortable replacing a hand written ChangeLog with autogenerated one.
 
 Regards,
 

It's just my first draft though, I intend to improve it over time,
patches welcome :) And it could maybe be moved to some better location.

  Edward

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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-06 Thread Ali Sabil

 From what I understand, so far there has been one proposal, from Olav, who
 proposed that he and John implement John's idea of implementing a git-serve
 plugin for the bzr repo server.  I think many people pointed out the major
 flaws in that scenario.  I want to stress that we should not make the same
 mistakes that we blame our downstream distros for making, namely:
 developing
 hacks in house instead of working them out upstream.  Moreover, we should
 not
 get ourselves in another homegrown mess that will need to be maintained for
 the years to come.  Look at our bugzilla situation now.  git-serve will be
 a
 bigger issue.



I just wanted to point out that the git-serve plugin for bzr is *not* an in
house hack, or a hack at all, it is part of the bzr-git plugin.

For people who are not aware of it, Bazaar is mainly an object model, while
Git is mainly a repository format coupled with a network protocol. What's
wrong with mapping an object model to an actual format/protocol ?

Concerning the asserted flaws in John's proposal, the only valid point, is
that it will need testing as the implementation is not very mature yet, all
the other assertions are just plain wrong.


Regards,

--
Ali
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-06 Thread Ruben Vermeersch

On di, 2009-01-06 at 04:53 -0500, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
 Ali Sabil wrote:
 
  Concerning the asserted flaws in John's proposal, the only valid point,
  is that it will need testing as the implementation is not very mature
  yet,
 
 And that's a HUGE issue, mind you.


Here's another problem I'd like to see pointed out. While the hybrid
solution might work fine within the GNOME infrastructure, what happens
if an outside contributor clones a repository, hacks on and publishes
his code on his own server.

Remember, we are talking about DVCSes, this *will* happen, it should
happen.

What if this user publishes his branch using bzr (which works fine with
the GNOME servers).

How will I merge this branch, if I'm using git?

It looks to me that with the git+bzr proposal, we're being forced to
learn both systems anyway. We can control what's going on on our own
servers, but not what happens outside.

So don't tell us it's equivalent. It's not. And let's not forget the
broad confusion that will arise from the fact that part of the
developers advice you to use git and other parts advice you to use bzr.

I am exceedingly less convinced that the advantages of supporting both
outweigh the disadvantages (looking at the usage patterns, not the
technical merits).

   R


--
Ruben Vermeersch (rubenv)
http://www.savanne.be

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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

Josselin Mouette wrote:
 Le mardi 06 janvier 2009 à 17:21 +0900, James Henstridge a écrit :
 I'd hope that any DVCS would get a larger user base than current list
 of active Subversion committers: anyone who contributes patches via
 mailing lists or bugzilla could use a DVCS the same way as a core
 developer.  The same could go for anyone who does distribution
 packaging.
 
 That’s foolish. We are certainly not going to clone 208 repositories for
 all GNOME packages we maintain. Especially when the tools to manage
 Debian packages with DVCSes are still inferior to those we have for the
 current svn+tarball scheme.

Just because you don't do it doesn't mean that the idea is foolish.

There certainly has been interest from multiple distros to move to a
DVCS-based workflow.

behdad
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-06 Thread Josselin Mouette

Le mardi 06 janvier 2009 à 13:10 +1100, Andrew Cowie a écrit :
 Regardless, GNOME is not switching to anything. If GNOME
 infrastructure is going to offer Git hosting, that's lovely for people
 who chose to use Git as their version control system. {shrug} fine. If
 GNOME infrastructure concurrently disables their Subversion hosting
 and/or people stop pushing their changes there, then that's perhaps a
 bit worse, because it means people in all three systems (+ svn makes
 four) will lose the easy way they have of collaborating. But again,
 whatever.

This is the point that makes me the most uneasy about a switch.
Currently, people can use whatever tool they know best (be it svn, svk,
bzr, git, hg or darcs) on top of a svn repository. That makes git users
angry since git-svn doesn’t work so well.

So instead of improving the said tool, git users want the repository to
switch to git instead. Which means it will only be accessible with git
(and with bzr using bzr-git). Users of other tools will just be screwed.

It’s not as if it mattered to me that much; I’m using tools much
crappier than git on a daily basis, and I’m sure I’ll be able to deal
with it. But if you really think that casual contributors or translators
will contribute as easily as they can today, I can only say “bwahahaha”.
I find svn to be still the easiest to use of that list, and while bzr
and hg have made laudable efforts in terms of usability, bringing them
on par to or better than svn in several areas, the same can’t be said of
git.

I find it also interesting to see developers of a project for which
usability is a prime goal choose the less usable VCS tool at their
disposal.

Cheers,
-- 
 .''`.
: :' :  We are debian.org. Lower your prices, surrender your code.
`. `'   We will add your hardware and software distinctiveness to
  `-our own. Resistance is futile.


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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-06 Thread Dave Neary

Hi,

Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
 What I told
 you was that because the switch does not affect those other people.  Yes, if
 your contributors are NOT committing to GNOME SVN, their opinions doesn't
 matter.  Neither does my mom's opinion matter in this case.  Nothing wrong
 with that.

This is only true if you don't believe that future contributions to the
GNOME base are independent of the RCS we decide to host on gnome.org
(should we decide to host only one).

If you can identify people contributing to GNOME projects outside
gnome.org who would commit directly to gnome.org if their preferred RCS
were available, then there is an opportunity cost to saying that their
opinion doesn't matter - if you don't consider their opinion, they will
never be committing directly to gnome.org (maybe that's OK, maybe it's not).

The question which we could ask in this case is: how many people are
contributing regularly to GNOME projects, and don't have an account on
GNOME SVN? And why don't they?

Another question: what is the cost associated with hosting multiple
DVCSes? I understand of course that most people don't even have one SCM
tool installed on their system. But for those not using a DVCS, moving
from 0 to 1 is the big move, and I am not sure that there is a huge cost
to having both git and bzr hosting on gnome.org, for official GNOME
projects (especially if those who want to use a git client for
bzr-hosted projects may do so).


snip

 Yeah, whatever.  I can't care less about what you prefer because you are
 already using it and are happy about it.  Keep your personal feelings out of
 this thread then and everyone will be the happier.  If others need their
 opinions expressed, I think they should do that themselves.

Behdad - it's disappointing to see you doing the same thing which you
expressed disappointment at this morning. This contributed nothing 
wasn't a very nice reply. Can you follow your own advice  stick to the
topic (which is, as you said, giving input to the people who will be
doing the work - and to my mind, saying that there are GNOME projects
not hosted on gnome.org because of the revision control system is
relevant to that discussion).

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
dne...@gnome.org
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

Dave Neary wrote:
 Hi,
 
 Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
 What I told
 you was that because the switch does not affect those other people.  Yes, if
 your contributors are NOT committing to GNOME SVN, their opinions doesn't
 matter.  Neither does my mom's opinion matter in this case.  Nothing wrong
 with that.
 
 This is only true if you don't believe that future contributions to the
 GNOME base are independent of the RCS we decide to host on gnome.org
 (should we decide to host only one).

You are of course right.  I probably should also have added that list of SVN
users is the only affordable way we could do a closed survey.  Simply because
that's the only list we have.  The only other realistic alternative would have
been a public survey with no authentication at all, and I hope we agree that
that would have not been more representative than the survey we did.


 If you can identify people contributing to GNOME projects outside
 gnome.org who would commit directly to gnome.org if their preferred RCS
 were available, then there is an opportunity cost to saying that their
 opinion doesn't matter - if you don't consider their opinion, they will
 never be committing directly to gnome.org (maybe that's OK, maybe it's not).
 
 The question which we could ask in this case is: how many people are
 contributing regularly to GNOME projects, and don't have an account on
 GNOME SVN? And why don't they?

How do we do that objectively?  I can name 10 people that push code to fdo
instead of GNOME because of their VCS preference.  The next guy can name 10
that push to Launchpad for the same reason.  The promise of the survey was to
give us solid numbers.  How do we do it for anything other than current
account holders?


 Another question: what is the cost associated with hosting multiple
 DVCSes? I understand of course that most people don't even have one SCM
 tool installed on their system. But for those not using a DVCS, moving
 from 0 to 1 is the big move, and I am not sure that there is a huge cost
 to having both git and bzr hosting on gnome.org, for official GNOME
 projects (especially if those who want to use a git client for
 bzr-hosted projects may do so).
 
 
 snip
 
 Yeah, whatever.  I can't care less about what you prefer because you are
 already using it and are happy about it.  Keep your personal feelings out of
 this thread then and everyone will be the happier.  If others need their
 opinions expressed, I think they should do that themselves.
 
 Behdad - it's disappointing to see you doing the same thing which you
 expressed disappointment at this morning. This contributed nothing 
 wasn't a very nice reply. Can you follow your own advice  stick to the
 topic (which is, as you said, giving input to the people who will be
 doing the work - and to my mind, saying that there are GNOME projects
 not hosted on gnome.org because of the revision control system is
 relevant to that discussion).

Guilty as charged.  I took it personal too.  My bad.

Cheers,
behdad


 Cheers,
 Dave.
 
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-06 Thread James Henstridge

2009/1/6 Josselin Mouette j...@debian.org:
 Le mardi 06 janvier 2009 à 17:21 +0900, James Henstridge a écrit :
 I'd hope that any DVCS would get a larger user base than current list
 of active Subversion committers: anyone who contributes patches via
 mailing lists or bugzilla could use a DVCS the same way as a core
 developer.  The same could go for anyone who does distribution
 packaging.

 That's foolish. We are certainly not going to clone 208 repositories for
 all GNOME packages we maintain. Especially when the tools to manage
 Debian packages with DVCSes are still inferior to those we have for the
 current svn+tarball scheme.

As I mentioned later on in the post you quoted, not everyone in these
groups will use a DVCS even if it is available: the existing patch
based work flows should work equally well compared to the status quo.

That said, there are definitely members of these groups who will use a
DVCS if it is available.

James.
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-06 Thread Dave Neary

Hi,

Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
 Dave Neary wrote:
snip
 This is only true if you don't believe that future contributions to the
 GNOME base are dependent of the RCS we decide to host on gnome.org
 (should we decide to host only one).
 
 You are of course right.  I probably should also have added that list of SVN
 users is the only affordable way we could do a closed survey.  Simply because
 that's the only list we have.  The only other realistic alternative would have
 been a public survey with no authentication at all, and I hope we agree that
 that would have not been more representative than the survey we did.

I think it's perfectly reasonable to consider people with GNOME SVN
accounts for a survey. I don't think it's correct to characterise that
sample as the only people affected by the change.

How you find out about the opinion of others potentially affected by the
change, and the extent to which you consider their opinion, is a
separate question.

 The question which we could ask in this case is: how many people are
 contributing regularly to GNOME projects, and don't have an account on
 GNOME SVN? And why don't they?
 
 How do we do that objectively?  I can name 10 people that push code to fdo
 instead of GNOME because of their VCS preference.  The next guy can name 10
 that push to Launchpad for the same reason.  The promise of the survey was to
 give us solid numbers.  How do we do it for anything other than current
 account holders?


I don't believe there's a way to objectively do that. We have to live
with a bit of subjectivity, I'm afraid.

A start would be to see how many official GNOME modules have moved their
development off gnome.org - a bunch of GNOME maintainers are using
either bzr or git-svn these days - and ask them if there are any regular
contributors who don't have/want/need an account on gnome.org.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
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GNOME Foundation member
dne...@gnome.org
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-06 Thread Wouter Bolsterlee

2009-01-06 klockan 08:21 skrev Max Kanat-Alexander:
 Git really has no API, you just run the commands and get the output.
 *Subversion* actually had the best API when I was writing VCI, FWIW.
 Git and CVS had the worst API, in terms of integration. There may be
 better modules available now, though--I wrote VCI in 2007.

Just an additional: Bazaar has a really nice Python API, but I understand
your software was written in Perl, so it couldn't be (easily) used.

— Wouter


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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-06 Thread Sandy Armstrong


On 01/06/2009 02:09 AM, Ruben Vermeersch wrote:

What if this user publishes his branch using bzr (which works fine with
the GNOME servers).

How will I merge this branch, if I'm using git?

It looks to me that with the git+bzr proposal, we're being forced to
learn both systems anyway. We can control what's going on on our own
servers, but not what happens outside.

So don't tell us it's equivalent. It's not. And let's not forget the
broad confusion that will arise from the fact that part of the
developers advice you to use git and other parts advice you to use bzr.

I am exceedingly less convinced that the advantages of supporting both
outweigh the disadvantages (looking at the usage patterns, not the
technical merits).
   


I was on the fence about this, especially because I prefer bzr to git.  
But Ruben is right on the money.  Implementing DVCS should not raise the 
barrier for entry for contributors.  It should not make it *harder* for 
maintainers to accept patches/branches.  If 70% of GNOME goes one way 
and 30% goes another way, it will suck for everybody.


We need one official VCS for GNOME.  The hybrid solution really only 
makes sense if that one VCS is bzr, which (sadly) seems to go against 
popular opinion.  So assuming we have the manpower to do the git 
conversion and the tools to make it rock (viewvc, giorious, whtaever), 
let's JFDI.


Man I'm tempted to make a pun about committing right now...

Sandy
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-06 Thread Hubert Figuiere

On Tue, 2009-01-06 at 03:46 -0500, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
 So, here is what I'm bringing to the table:  I'm volunteering to work
 with
 interested fd.o admins and other volunteers to switch GNOME to git.  I
 need to
 first go check to see if I can secure enough time to lead this, and if
 I can
 get enough peoples' attention to make this happen in a timely manner.
 I will
 make an official proposal when I figure those out.

Given the nature of the GNOME repositories, ie 1 repository per module,
and the fact that we have a list of core modules for the various
suites, it could be useful to do this one by one using a few
volunteers project.

In that case I volunteer the one I maintain, namely raw-thumbnailer
and niepce[1] to switch them to git.
It would allow to have the infrastructure setup and tested while still
not blocking GNOME itself from its development pace.

Just my 2¢

Hub

[1] and for that last one, actually I'd love to fix its history as that
SVN export/import totally foobared it, long story short, because
subversion is deficient in disallowing import/export without shell
access.

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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-06 Thread Loïc Minier

On Tue, Jan 06, 2009, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
 From what I understand, so far there has been one proposal, from Olav, who
 proposed that he and John implement John's idea of implementing a git-serve
 plugin for the bzr repo server.

 I wonder whether you received interesting ideas in the survey itself?

 As insane as it might sound, I personally wouldn't mind each module
 picking its VCS.  I think common tasks which random contributors need
 to achieve can be documented for all VCS-es (checkout, do some changes
 and commit or create a patch).  Just like various modules are using
 various programming languages or even build systems.

-- 
Loïc Minier
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-06 Thread Alexander Larsson

On Tue, 2009-01-06 at 21:01 +0100, Loïc Minier wrote:
 On Tue, Jan 06, 2009, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
  From what I understand, so far there has been one proposal, from Olav, who
  proposed that he and John implement John's idea of implementing a git-serve
  plugin for the bzr repo server.
 
  I wonder whether you received interesting ideas in the survey itself?
 
  As insane as it might sound, I personally wouldn't mind each module
  picking its VCS.  I think common tasks which random contributors need
  to achieve can be documented for all VCS-es (checkout, do some changes
  and commit or create a patch).  Just like various modules are using
  various programming languages or even build systems.

Each app picking its VCS seems better than the proposed system with both
bzr and git. Because with the proposal you can pick any vcs you like as
a user, but if you didn't pick the one the maintainer used then he and
the other developers can't pull from you and you're left out on your own
development island. So, all modules would anyway need to marks out what
the prefered vcs for it is and all developers would have to learn both.

Of course, all that could be avoided if we just decided on one...


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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

Loïc Minier wrote:
 On Tue, Jan 06, 2009, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
 From what I understand, so far there has been one proposal, from Olav, who
 proposed that he and John implement John's idea of implementing a git-serve
 plugin for the bzr repo server.
 
  I wonder whether you received interesting ideas in the survey itself?

All the survey responses (including all the comments, but excluding svn user
names) are out there for everyone to browse.

  As insane as it might sound, I personally wouldn't mind each module
  picking its VCS.  I think common tasks which random contributors need
  to achieve can be documented for all VCS-es (checkout, do some changes
  and commit or create a patch).  Just like various modules are using
  various programming languages or even build systems.

This idea was discussed when the DVCS thing was brought up first.  I think
Olav was against it for sysadmin workload reasons.  Every VCS-facing service
needs to be implemented for all the supported systems and given that we don't
seem to have enough man hours to do one, doing multiple ones just seems
unreachable.

behdad

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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-06 Thread Alberto Ruiz

2009/1/6 Alexander Larsson al...@redhat.com:
 On Tue, 2009-01-06 at 21:01 +0100, Loïc Minier wrote:
 On Tue, Jan 06, 2009, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
  From what I understand, so far there has been one proposal, from Olav, who
  proposed that he and John implement John's idea of implementing a git-serve
  plugin for the bzr repo server.

  I wonder whether you received interesting ideas in the survey itself?

  As insane as it might sound, I personally wouldn't mind each module
  picking its VCS.  I think common tasks which random contributors need
  to achieve can be documented for all VCS-es (checkout, do some changes
  and commit or create a patch).  Just like various modules are using
  various programming languages or even build systems.

 Each app picking its VCS seems better than the proposed system with both
 bzr and git. Because with the proposal you can pick any vcs you like as
 a user, but if you didn't pick the one the maintainer used then he and
 the other developers can't pull from you and you're left out on your own
 development island. So, all modules would anyway need to marks out what
 the prefered vcs for it is and all developers would have to learn both.

Am I the only one crying on how bad and confusing is this going to be
for newcomers?

One of the most obvious ways to contribute to free software these days
it to do it on the people's most used apps, which are the desktop apps
(translator as an example). There are guys out there who doesn't even
get the point of VCS and their first approach to them is going to be
GNOME itself.

Think about them trying to browse for information on how to create my
first patch, and this section saying you have to figure out which
project are you gonna pick, and then, learn to use it.

To be honest, I think that this discussion would just go away if we
had Tortoise like apps integrated with jhbuild for Nautilus where you
have a common set of graphical tools to do the most common work for
90% of the VCS users. Then, and only then, we could stop worrying
about which VCS do we choose, since we won't have to fiddle with any
command line (for god's sake, we're in 2009 already).

 Of course, all that could be avoided if we just decided on one...


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Un saludo,
Alberto Ruiz
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-06 Thread Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro

On Tue, 2009-01-06 at 21:30 +, Alberto Ruiz wrote:
 2009/1/6 Alexander Larsson al...@redhat.com:
  On Tue, 2009-01-06 at 21:01 +0100, Loïc Minier wrote:
  On Tue, Jan 06, 2009, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
   From what I understand, so far there has been one proposal, from Olav, 
   who
   proposed that he and John implement John's idea of implementing a 
   git-serve
   plugin for the bzr repo server.
 
   I wonder whether you received interesting ideas in the survey itself?
 
   As insane as it might sound, I personally wouldn't mind each module
   picking its VCS.  I think common tasks which random contributors need
   to achieve can be documented for all VCS-es (checkout, do some changes
   and commit or create a patch).  Just like various modules are using
   various programming languages or even build systems.
 
  Each app picking its VCS seems better than the proposed system with both
  bzr and git. Because with the proposal you can pick any vcs you like as
  a user, but if you didn't pick the one the maintainer used then he and
  the other developers can't pull from you and you're left out on your own
  development island. So, all modules would anyway need to marks out what
  the prefered vcs for it is and all developers would have to learn both.
 
 Am I the only one crying on how bad and confusing is this going to be
 for newcomers?
 
 One of the most obvious ways to contribute to free software these days
 it to do it on the people's most used apps, which are the desktop apps
 (translator as an example). There are guys out there who doesn't even
 get the point of VCS and their first approach to them is going to be
 GNOME itself.
 
 Think about them trying to browse for information on how to create my
 first patch, and this section saying you have to figure out which
 project are you gonna pick, and then, learn to use it.

Welcome to the open source world.  Generally open source developers are
not limited to GNOME, and they eventually learn 2-3 revision control
systems.  I mean, they don't need to learn a lot of commands of each
RCS, just the basics:

  1- Checkout/clone module;
  2- Update;
  3- Create a diff of changes, redirecting to a patch file.

With those three operations alone is enough to cover 90% of all open
source developers needs when they are contributing to a project to which
they have no commit privileges.  And those two operations alone are dead
easy to learn for a number of VCSs.

Developers with commit privileges need to know just a few more commands:

  1- commit
  2- push (if applicable)

And finally maintainers need to know a few more commands, like
branching, merging, and tagging.  But they only need to learn those for
the modules they maintain.

 
 To be honest, I think that this discussion would just go away if we
 had Tortoise like apps integrated with jhbuild for Nautilus where you
 have a common set of graphical tools to do the most common work for
 90% of the VCS users. Then, and only then, we could stop worrying
 about which VCS do we choose, since we won't have to fiddle with any
 command line (for god's sake, we're in 2009 already).

Disagreed.  Command line interface is often more productive than any GUI
for certain things.  I don't use any IDE for source code editing, and I
would certainly hate to have to use Nautilus for commits.

Not to say that GUIs aren't useful for some things.  I have seen nice
GUIs for bazaar, git, and mercurial.  But they are most useful for
visualizing the repository tree, rather than operations that change the
repository, it seems to me.

Regards,

-- 
Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro
g...@inescporto.pt gust...@users.sourceforge.net
The universe is always one step beyond logic -- Frank Herbert

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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-05 Thread Dan Winship

Emmanuele Bassi wrote:
 [0] I'm reasonably sure it has some. not as the one proposed to avoid
 pissing off somebody somewhere because we want to be inclusive -- no,
 lemme rephrase that: we are *fucking afraid of committment*. seriously:
 an abstraction over DVCS? what have we become? are we *ever* going make
 *any* decision about *anything*? this is actually a larger issue with
 the GNOME community: we are being afraid.

Seriously.

If git via bzr server had been listed as an option on the survey, I
would have ranked it dead last (after just bzr, and after stay with
svn).

It seems pretty clear that the git-over-bzr solution doesn't make the
git users any happier than git-over-svn does, so let's not pretend that
it's any different from doing just bzr. So, given that we seem to have
sysadmin resources to do bzr, but we don't have sysadmin resources to do
git, the question we really need to answer is do you prefer migrating
to bzr, or sticking with svn?.

-- Dan
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-05 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo

On 1/5/09, Johannes Schmid j...@jsschmid.de wrote:

 6. Check all the documentation stuff on live.gnome.org that needs to be
  updated. That is really important because not everybody is familiar with
  git. There should also be a short introduction to git somewhere on the
  wiki. And some announcements should probably be made...


And perhaps explain the benefits and cool stuff, if we are moving to
!svn, we should take advantage of the new cool stuff introduced...
that's where something like Federico's proposal to use gitorious fit.
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-05 Thread Patryk Zawadzki

On Mon, Jan 5, 2009 at 5:22 PM, Olav Vitters o...@bkor.dhs.org wrote:
 On Sun, Jan 04, 2009 at 06:34:47PM -0500, David Zeuthen wrote:
 On Mon, 2009-01-05 at 00:18 +0100, Olav Vitters wrote:
  I am not evading. Stop trying to make this personal. I don't care about
  CoC, I don't like you're talking to me.
 Please. Stop trying to make this look like it's personal and like I'm
 assaulting you. Because I didn't. And I resent the accusation.
 You ask Is it *really* so hard to understand that this whole git-serve
 is a terrible idea. As I don't find it terrible, the statement makes me
 feel like I'm considered an idiot for disagreeing. Then when I try to
 point that out, I get Oh, you chose not to quote that... anyway, I'm
 dropping this.

Guys please both exchange a series of yo mama jokes in private then
have a beer and shake your hands. It's obvious some of us get excited
as it *is* a beauty contest we're participating in even if we paint it
as a survey. It's normal and it's fine, just don't let personal taste
win over GNOME. We're mostly engineers and we're here to build bike
sheds, not to paint them. :)

I really really like git but I couldn't care less if we switched to
any of the things I picked over svn ;)

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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-05 Thread Ruben Vermeersch

On ma, 2009-01-05 at 12:32 -0500, Diego Escalante Urrelo wrote:
 On 1/5/09, Johannes Schmid j...@jsschmid.de wrote:
 
  6. Check all the documentation stuff on live.gnome.org that needs to be
   updated. That is really important because not everybody is familiar with
   git. There should also be a short introduction to git somewhere on the
   wiki. And some announcements should probably be made...
 
 
 And perhaps explain the benefits and cool stuff, if we are moving to
 !svn, we should take advantage of the new cool stuff introduced...
 that's where something like Federico's proposal to use gitorious fit.

Yes, rather than fighting over the backend storage format, let's focus
on making our developer experience better. Having a gitorious instance
for all of GNOME (our own github, powered by free  open-source software
[1]), will make collaboration much easier, as well as cover
infrastructure problems.


[1]: http://gitorious.org/projects/gitorious


--
Ruben Vermeersch (rubenv)
http://www.savanne.be

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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-05 Thread Frederic Peters

Mathias Hasselmann wrote:

 Am I missing something?

Make build.gnome.org work with the new setup; I plan to write some
requirements (nothing fancy, and stuffs that will most probably be
also required elsewhere).

There may also be some other infrastructure systems that would
require some porting (as far as I am concerned, library-web will
not require changes).


Frederic
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-05 Thread Frederic Peters

Josselin Mouette wrote:

 BTW, do we have the resources to migrate the repository to the SVN 1.5
 format? It looks like, independently from other decisions, a quick and
 easy way to improve the situation – and to improve it right now, not in
 2010.

Olav announced it on October 29th:

  http://mail.gnome.org/archives/devel-announce-list/2008-October/msg4.html


Cheers,
Frederic
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-05 Thread Elijah Newren

Hi,

On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 7:51 AM, Olav Vitters o...@bkor.dhs.org wrote:
 Anyway, I'd rather add John Carr to the sysadmin team. I plan to make a
 proposal to switch GNOME to a DVCS where Git works using Johns
 suggestion. Then other sysadmins[1] can suggest whatever proposal they
 want. These proposals can be investigated on merit and then a one can be
 chosen (chosen as in: go ahead and try if this would work, not go
 ahead blindly; everything must be tested before a cutover).

 [1] or whomever. Although I don't see how that would work.

While I'm sure John will at least be able to get basic functionality
working, and the project has a certain amount of cool geek factor,
taking John's proposal as a path forward concerns many in the
community for a variety of reasons[*1].  (In fact, I bet such an
option would rank lower than any native vcs option had it been
included in the survey.)

I'd like to help with another path forward, namely native git
repositories since I believe that is what most of the community wants.
 As you said, it isn't clear how it could work for non-sysadmins to
come up with clear proposal strategies and implementations.  Are there
others on the sysadmin team who are willing to work on such a
transition?  If so, how can I help?

Elijah


[*1] Reasons I've seen or can think of off the top of my head:
* As James H. mentioned on John's blog, you'd likely end up with the
intersection of the features of the two version control systems rather
than improving things.
* John's project does not have a large community behind it and
supporting it.  In fact, it may end up with a bus factor of 1[*2].
Even if it increases, it doesn't have the kind of large community
that, say, git-svn has.  In general, it's unsettling to many to adopt
a project without a large community behind it.
* John's bridge would have to be updated whenever either the bzr or
git formats changed (in particular, bzr has changed repository formats
several times and even promotes it's ability to seamlessly change
repository formats as an advantage), or whenever the network protocols
changed (including protocol extensions, such as the git push
tell-me-more extension).
* It would introduce extra lag between when new features become
available, since the bridge would need to be updated for each such
change.
* There's no guarantee bzr and git will change in ways that will make
them remain compatible, so we run the risk of accepting (additional)
feature losses as time goes on.  It may be a small risk, but we simply
don't know and have no way of knowing.
* All software has bugs.  John's bridge can't be exempt, and
particularly as new and not-yet-tested software, it's more of a risk.
Will that mean data loss?  Loss of features?  Inability to perform
certain operations?  While the bugs are being investigated and fixed,
what do maintainers do?  Use bzr since it's the official format?  I
think John's pretty clever and that we would likely avoid most such
issues -- but there's no guarantee and this is something that affects
developers daily work.
* I believe bzr proponents even admit that bzr is still slow for
network operations.  John's bridge would essentially add another layer
on top of that.

[*2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-05 Thread Josselin Mouette

Le lundi 05 janvier 2009 à 09:51 -0500, Dan Winship a écrit :
 It seems pretty clear that the git-over-bzr solution doesn't make the
 git users any happier than git-over-svn does, so let's not pretend that
 it's any different from doing just bzr. So, given that we seem to have
 sysadmin resources to do bzr, but we don't have sysadmin resources to do
 git, the question we really need to answer is do you prefer migrating
 to bzr, or sticking with svn?.

BTW, do we have the resources to migrate the repository to the SVN 1.5
format? It looks like, independently from other decisions, a quick and
easy way to improve the situation – and to improve it right now, not in
2010.

-- 
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: :' :  We are debian.org. Lower your prices, surrender your code.
`. `'   We will add your hardware and software distinctiveness to
  `-our own. Resistance is futile.


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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-05 Thread Johannes Schmid

Hi!

Am Montag, den 05.01.2009, 16:23 +0100 schrieb Mathias Hasselmann:
 First of all I want to thank Behdad and the participants of the survey
 for giving us numbers.
 
 Second I want to complain about the direction this discussion takes.
 No idea why that many people become personal. This is really unpleasant.
 
 Third of all: What so complicated about this migration? As far as I see,
 the migration consists of the following steps, please tell me if I am
 too naive:
 
  1. Identify admin scripts that must be ported from svn to git. So
 far I only know new-svn-repos.
  2. Identify commit hooks which have to be ported. Should only
 global hooks be ported, or would the migration team also be
 responsible for porting module specific hooks?
  3. Actually port the commit hooks.
  4. Create snapshots of all SVN repositories using git-svn.
  5. Now finish one repository after another:
  1. Mark the SVN repository as read-only.
  2. Run a final git-svn rebase.
  3. Maybe strip git-svn information.
  4. Install commit hooks.
  5. Test the new git repository.
  6. Make the new git repository public.
 
 Am I missing something?

6. Check all the documentation stuff on live.gnome.org that needs to be
updated. That is really important because not everybody is familiar with
git. There should also be a short introduction to git somewhere on the
wiki. And some announcements should probably be made...

Regards,
Johannes


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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-05 Thread Natan Yellin

On Mon, Jan 5, 2009 at 1:18 PM, Felipe Contreras felipe.contre...@gmail.com
 wrote:

 2009/1/5 Ali Sabil ali.sa...@gmail.com:
 
 
  On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 11:33 PM, Olav Vitters o...@bkor.dhs.org wrote:
 
  On Sun, Jan 04, 2009 at 05:29:02PM -0500, David Zeuthen wrote:
   Uh, but that's exactly how I understood the proposal and I believe
 that
   the points I made (that you didn't respond to) still stands: That it's
   crazy to officially want to support git, bzr and hg *at* the same time
   *from* the same repo. It's just asking for trouble.
 
  That isn't true. It is Bzr on server, with Git support. Nothing about
  Hg, nothing about doing partly Git, partly Bzr.
 
 
  Sorry for not being clear in my explanations. Basically, as Olav pointed
  out, it is about having Bazaar on the server, with a git-serve plugin
  allowing it to fulfill the git client requests as well as the bzr client
  requests.
 
  The following scenarios will be possible:
  (bzr repo) - (git serve plugin) - network --- (git
 client)
  (bzr repo) - (bzr serve) - network --- (bzr client)
 
  both bzr and git will operate fully, nothing will be partially supported,
  since the bazaar repository format is a superset of the git repo format
 (ie.
  it stores more metadata).
 
  I talked about hg, just to highlight that the solution is quite future
  proof, because you can certainly apply the same solution to allow hg
 clients
  to access the repository.

 First of all, who is going to develop and maintain the git serve
 plugin? Whoever does it I bet the end result won't be as good as the
 native git. Emulators tend to behave differently from the native
 counterpart.

 Second, as David mentioned; what would happen in the case the git
 protocol is updated and backward compatibility is removed? We will
 need to wait until the git serve plugin is updated, possibly
 rewritten.

 Third, every repository format has advantages and drawbacks. So far it
 looks like the git repository format works for most people, what is
 the need to avoid it?

 Fourth, we should not re-invent the wheel, people use either bzr or
 git, and not both for a reason; depending on a theoretical git serve
 plugin is just asking for trouble.

The way I understood the proposal, bazaar would be the official dvcs and a
usable- albeit officially unsupported- git wrapper would be provided.

Assuming that a future version of git doesn't introduce incompatibilities,
the approach has the advantage of being an easy solution which works for all
git and bazaar users. If a future version of git _is_ incompatible, the
official bazaar access would be totally unaffected.

That said, according to the survey most people use git. Most of those users
don't care about bazaar access at all, but might be slightly irritated if
there are any quirks with the git wrapper.

If you'd like to try to make everyone happy then the wrapper approach has
it's advantages. If you'd rather make a small group slightly annoyed and a
bigger group totally happy then go with git.


 Fifth, if the majority of the GNOME community prefers git, why degrade
 the git experience with an emulation? It makes much more sense for the
 bzr minority to emulate bzr experience with bzr-git if so they desire.

 --
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-05 Thread Felipe Contreras

2009/1/5 Ali Sabil ali.sa...@gmail.com:


 On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 11:33 PM, Olav Vitters o...@bkor.dhs.org wrote:

 On Sun, Jan 04, 2009 at 05:29:02PM -0500, David Zeuthen wrote:
  Uh, but that's exactly how I understood the proposal and I believe that
  the points I made (that you didn't respond to) still stands: That it's
  crazy to officially want to support git, bzr and hg *at* the same time
  *from* the same repo. It's just asking for trouble.

 That isn't true. It is Bzr on server, with Git support. Nothing about
 Hg, nothing about doing partly Git, partly Bzr.


 Sorry for not being clear in my explanations. Basically, as Olav pointed
 out, it is about having Bazaar on the server, with a git-serve plugin
 allowing it to fulfill the git client requests as well as the bzr client
 requests.

 The following scenarios will be possible:
 (bzr repo) - (git serve plugin) - network --- (git client)
 (bzr repo) - (bzr serve) - network --- (bzr client)

 both bzr and git will operate fully, nothing will be partially supported,
 since the bazaar repository format is a superset of the git repo format (ie.
 it stores more metadata).

 I talked about hg, just to highlight that the solution is quite future
 proof, because you can certainly apply the same solution to allow hg clients
 to access the repository.

First of all, who is going to develop and maintain the git serve
plugin? Whoever does it I bet the end result won't be as good as the
native git. Emulators tend to behave differently from the native
counterpart.

Second, as David mentioned; what would happen in the case the git
protocol is updated and backward compatibility is removed? We will
need to wait until the git serve plugin is updated, possibly
rewritten.

Third, every repository format has advantages and drawbacks. So far it
looks like the git repository format works for most people, what is
the need to avoid it?

Fourth, we should not re-invent the wheel, people use either bzr or
git, and not both for a reason; depending on a theoretical git serve
plugin is just asking for trouble.

Fifth, if the majority of the GNOME community prefers git, why degrade
the git experience with an emulation? It makes much more sense for the
bzr minority to emulate bzr experience with bzr-git if so they desire.

-- 
Felipe Contreras
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-05 Thread Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro

On Mon, 2009-01-05 at 11:23 +0100, Edward Hervey wrote:
 On Sun, 2009-01-04 at 20:32 +, Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro wrote:
  On Sat, 2009-01-03 at 22:46 -0500, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
   In December I ran a distributed version control system survey for GNOME.
   From the survey opening page:
   
 Thank you for taking the GNOME DVCS Survey.  This survey is run on 
   behalf
 of the GNOME Foundation board of directors, release team, and sysadmin 
   team.
 The GNOME project is planning a possible move from SVN to a distributed
 version control system in 2009.  The contenders for the system to use 
   are
 bzr, git, and hg.  The aim of the survey is to help us better understand
 familiarity and preferences of our active contributor base regarding the
 future version control system for GNOME.  The survey results will be
 informational and will be sent to foundation-list and desktop-devel-list
 upon completion.
   
   GNOME contributors with an SVN account who had an SSH key installed on 
   their
   account were invited to fill in the survey.  A total of 1083 account 
   holders
   were invited, and 579 filled in the survey.  The survey results are now
   available to the public:
   
 http://www.gnome.org/~behdad/dvcs-survey/
   
   Elijah Newren did an initial analysis of the data.  His analysis also 
   includes
   the survey questions and answers.  Find it at:
   
 http://blogs.gnome.org/newren/2009/01/03/gnome-dvcs-survey-results/
   
   If you analyze the results, please reply to this thread and also leave a
   comment on my blog post linking to your analysis:
   
 http://mces.blogspot.com/2009/01/gnome-dvcs-survey.html
  
  
  Just in case I am forced to switch to git in the future (being open
  minded here, although I prefer bazaar), does someone have any advice how
  to generate a nice GNU style ChangeLog (like what emacs produces) from
  git commit logs?  I know that some projects like Cairo auto-generate
  ChangeLog already, but the default git changelog format is too
  detailed/ugly IMHO.
 
   Heya, I wrote a python script for PiTiVi (now that we've switch to
 git) that does just that and which we run at (pre-)release-time to
 generate the ChangeLog file:
 
 http://git.pitivi.org/?p=pitivi.git;a=blob_plain;f=docs/makeChangelog.py;hb=HEAD
 

Heh, thanks a lot.  This looks nice.  Nicer than the one in gnulib that
Rui Tiago pointed out.  Although I must say not as nice as my 'gnulog'
bazaar log formatter plugin.. ;-)  But I guess good enough that I'd be
comfortable replacing a hand written ChangeLog with autogenerated one.

Regards,

-- 
Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro
g...@inescporto.pt gust...@users.sourceforge.net
The universe is always one step beyond logic -- Frank Herbert

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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-05 Thread Edward Hervey

On Sun, 2009-01-04 at 20:32 +, Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro wrote:
 On Sat, 2009-01-03 at 22:46 -0500, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
  In December I ran a distributed version control system survey for GNOME.
  From the survey opening page:
  
Thank you for taking the GNOME DVCS Survey.  This survey is run on behalf
of the GNOME Foundation board of directors, release team, and sysadmin 
  team.
The GNOME project is planning a possible move from SVN to a distributed
version control system in 2009.  The contenders for the system to use are
bzr, git, and hg.  The aim of the survey is to help us better understand
familiarity and preferences of our active contributor base regarding the
future version control system for GNOME.  The survey results will be
informational and will be sent to foundation-list and desktop-devel-list
upon completion.
  
  GNOME contributors with an SVN account who had an SSH key installed on their
  account were invited to fill in the survey.  A total of 1083 account holders
  were invited, and 579 filled in the survey.  The survey results are now
  available to the public:
  
http://www.gnome.org/~behdad/dvcs-survey/
  
  Elijah Newren did an initial analysis of the data.  His analysis also 
  includes
  the survey questions and answers.  Find it at:
  
http://blogs.gnome.org/newren/2009/01/03/gnome-dvcs-survey-results/
  
  If you analyze the results, please reply to this thread and also leave a
  comment on my blog post linking to your analysis:
  
http://mces.blogspot.com/2009/01/gnome-dvcs-survey.html
 
 
 Just in case I am forced to switch to git in the future (being open
 minded here, although I prefer bazaar), does someone have any advice how
 to generate a nice GNU style ChangeLog (like what emacs produces) from
 git commit logs?  I know that some projects like Cairo auto-generate
 ChangeLog already, but the default git changelog format is too
 detailed/ugly IMHO.

  Heya, I wrote a python script for PiTiVi (now that we've switch to
git) that does just that and which we run at (pre-)release-time to
generate the ChangeLog file:

http://git.pitivi.org/?p=pitivi.git;a=blob_plain;f=docs/makeChangelog.py;hb=HEAD

  Edward

 

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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-05 Thread Mathias Hasselmann

First of all I want to thank Behdad and the participants of the survey
for giving us numbers.

Second I want to complain about the direction this discussion takes.
No idea why that many people become personal. This is really unpleasant.

Third of all: What so complicated about this migration? As far as I see,
the migration consists of the following steps, please tell me if I am
too naive:

 1. Identify admin scripts that must be ported from svn to git. So
far I only know new-svn-repos.
 2. Identify commit hooks which have to be ported. Should only
global hooks be ported, or would the migration team also be
responsible for porting module specific hooks?
 3. Actually port the commit hooks.
 4. Create snapshots of all SVN repositories using git-svn.
 5. Now finish one repository after another:
 1. Mark the SVN repository as read-only.
 2. Run a final git-svn rebase.
 3. Maybe strip git-svn information.
 4. Install commit hooks.
 5. Test the new git repository.
 6. Make the new git repository public.

Am I missing something?

  * Steps one and two have to be done by the current SVN admins.
  * Step three is a programming task and therefore can be done by
each GNOME hacker knowing the programming languages used.
  * Step four rounds automatically and just needs some watching.
  * Step five could be done in parallel.

So is it really true, that we don't have the man power to do this
migration? I cannot believe this.

Ciao,
Mathias
-- 
Mathias Hasselmann mathias.hasselm...@gmx.de
http://taschenorakel.de/mathias/, http://www.openismus.com/

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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-05 Thread Olav Vitters

On Sun, Jan 04, 2009 at 06:34:47PM -0500, David Zeuthen wrote:
 On Mon, 2009-01-05 at 00:18 +0100, Olav Vitters wrote:
  I am not evading. Stop trying to make this personal. I don't care about
  CoC, I don't like you're talking to me.
 
 Please. Stop trying to make this look like it's personal and like I'm
 assaulting you. Because I didn't. And I resent the accusation.

You ask Is it *really* so hard to understand that this whole git-serve
is a terrible idea. As I don't find it terrible, the statement makes me
feel like I'm considered an idiot for disagreeing. Then when I try to
point that out, I get Oh, you chose not to quote that... anyway, I'm
dropping this.

I'm not saying you're assaulting me (way too strong). I just don't like
the tone.

but suggest offline if needed (in hindsight, probably should've done
that right away). Only replying on list to make clear to everyone that I
didn't think you were assaulting.

-- 
Regards,
Olav
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-05 Thread Julien PUYDT


Ali Sabil a écrit :

That's not what John's proposal is about ! John wants to use the bzr format
as a repository format, and add a git-serve plugin to bzr to be able to
talk to the git clients. In other words, you will be able to access the
same data using either bzr, git or hg.


Well, if people say git and your answer is bzr with a git frontend, 
then why don't we stick with svn on the server and let people use 
git-svn if they please ?


When I want to ride my bike, I don't install a new pedal system on my 
car : I just use my bike!


Snark

PS: notice that my last comment in the survey was already something like 
this : if switching is too costly or people can't agree on what to 
switch to, then let's keep svn and let people use git-svn, hg-svn, 
bzr-svn, etc-svn.

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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-05 Thread Olav Vitters

On Mon, Jan 05, 2009 at 07:00:52AM -0700, Elijah Newren wrote:
 I'd like to help with another path forward, namely native git
 repositories since I believe that is what most of the community wants.
  As you said, it isn't clear how it could work for non-sysadmins to
 come up with clear proposal strategies and implementations.  Are there
 others on the sysadmin team who are willing to work on such a
 transition?  If so, how can I help?

Don't know if there are other sysadmins who'd work on this. I've cc'ed
gnome-sysadmin so that people can answer themselves instead of me
guessing.


I'll let John reply on all other questions.

-- 
Regards,
Olav
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-05 Thread Andrew Cowie

On Sat, 2009-01-03 at 22:46 -0500, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
GNOME contributors with an SVN account who had an SSH key installed on
their account were invited to fill in the survey.

[It is NOT my intention to get all negative here; I understand - and
accept - that projects make decisions and not everyone is happy with
them. Luckily this decision ultimately is one I can ignore.
Nevertheless, I have been asked by a number of people to write to this
thread with why I am so dissatisfied. I do appreciate the effort people
made, even if I feel that the way the whole survey exercise was
conducted it was impossible for Git to lose]

Some comments:

It's a shame that hackers who contribute to GNOME projects which don't
use svn.gnome.org were excluded.

(I was told their opinions didn't matter. {shrug} that's fine,
so long as nobody tries to represent this survey as what GNOME
hackers think)

It was also a shame that I (one who does happen to have a GNOME svn
account) was not able to complete the survey either because it crashes
Epiphany when you i) vote for bzr and ii) withhold your vote from git,
hg, and svn.

(When I asked if it might be possible to fix the survey so that
GNOME's web browser didn't crash, I was told known bug and
too bad, you have to express a preference for Git and Mercurial
even if you don't want to. Strange take on democracy. I am
rather accustomed to the idea that declining to express a
preference for something is an acceptable form of voting.
Whatever)

I explicitly did not want to chose Git or Mercurial, because I knew
exactly what was going to happen. I've heard it several times already in
#gnome-hackers and elsewhere:

so it seems the people who prefer Bazaar like Git as their
second choice, so surely it's ok to go with that. Great!
Decision made

No. The rest of the survey was irrelevant. It was quite evident that the
object of the exercise was to allow people to say lots of people said
Git was either their first or second choice which sounds very
impressive, and was exactly the one thing I did NOT want to support.

So it crashed my browser. Nice.

We chose the Bazaar decentralized version control system for our GNOME
project even before the people behin GNOME's centralized code hosting
made the courageous and monumental decision to switch from CVS to
Subversion. Since GNOME didn't offer any way for us to host our
'mainline' branch on any official sounding resource, {shrug} we didn't.

And so we don't.

And that's actually the only issue that matters so far as I can tell. No
one can force us to stop using Bazaar. People who work at places like
Immendio who are using Git to hack on GTK+ cannot be forced to stop git
either.

And I wouldn't want them to. They're happy with their tool. We're happy
with ours.

When CVS was the only interchange (actually, that's not true, since the
real interchange for most projects is attachments to Bugzilla of all
things), then indeed GNOME switching to Subversion was a big deal.

But in the era of distributed version control, the next step really
matters little. Whatever GNOME _infrastructure_ offers next in terms
of hosting is really quite irrelevant, since quite anyone can host their
own projects and publish their own branches with nothing more than a
vanilla web server.

If the choice had happened to be Bazaar, then we probably would have
moved our principle copy of our 'mainline' branch there. That would have
been nice but otherwise is inconsequential since hosting the primary
'mainline' somewhere else costs us nothing, and I long since offered
other people accounts to publish their own branches there too. But since
it's going to be Git, well, it offers nothing for us.

If the choice had been the other way around, then Git people would
simply continue to host their branches somewhere else as they already
area. Again, no change.

This is ultimately why the whole debate is a bit pointless.

Regardless, GNOME is not switching to anything. If GNOME
infrastructure is going to offer Git hosting, that's lovely for people
who chose to use Git as their version control system. {shrug} fine. If
GNOME infrastructure concurrently disables their Subversion hosting
and/or people stop pushing their changes there, then that's perhaps a
bit worse, because it means people in all three systems (+ svn makes
four) will lose the easy way they have of collaborating. But again,
whatever.

I will close by saying that switching to Bazaar was an unbelievable
breath of fresh air after so much pain using Git. I wrote about that
briefly here:
http://research.operationaldynamics.com/blogs/andrew/software/version-control/git-is-like-cvs.html

I've been using DVCS systems for a long long time. I have great respect
for all the groups who have worked on the 3rd generation tools.
Unfortunately I have no sympathy for Git anymore, and am tired of it
screwing over people

Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-05 Thread Elijah Newren

Hi,

[Disclaimer: I wasn't involved in the construction or running of the
survey, other than the analysis you saw plus some late feedback on the
survey questions (I think my feedback was merely to suggest the
other answer for contributor types.)]


2009/1/5 Andrew Cowie and...@operationaldynamics.com:
 On Sat, 2009-01-03 at 22:46 -0500, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
 GNOME contributors with an SVN account who had an SSH key installed on
 their account were invited to fill in the survey.

 [It is NOT my intention to get all negative here; I understand - and
 accept - that projects make decisions and not everyone is happy with
 them. Luckily this decision ultimately is one I can ignore.
 Nevertheless, I have been asked by a number of people to write to this
 thread with why I am so dissatisfied. I do appreciate the effort people
 made, even if I feel that the way the whole survey exercise was
 conducted it was impossible for Git to lose]

Thanks for taking the time to do so.  I'm sorry you feel that way
about the survey exercise; I was encouraged that people were moving
forward and that they had created what I felt was an unbiased survey
as possible (Behdad asked for feedback from the foundation board,
release team, and others before sending it out, and I think my main
comment at the time was that I was happy to see the lack of bias in
the survey; my only other comment was the other contributor thing,
IIRC.)

 Some comments:

 ++

 It's a shame that hackers who contribute to GNOME projects which don't
 use svn.gnome.org were excluded.

(I was told their opinions didn't matter. {shrug} that's fine,
so long as nobody tries to represent this survey as what GNOME
hackers think)

How would you draw the line?  Who should be included and who
shouldn't?  And how do we contact them all?  I think doing a survey of
any group other than those with svn commit access would be practically
unmanageable...and far more likely to be suspected of
non-representative-ness [New word!].

Also, if users aren't using GNOME svn then why would they care if we
switch or not?  Shouldn't the survey poll those whom it would affect?

 ++

 It was also a shame that I (one who does happen to have a GNOME svn
 account) was not able to complete the survey either because it crashes
 Epiphany when you i) vote for bzr and ii) withhold your vote from git,
 hg, and svn.

(When I asked if it might be possible to fix the survey so that
GNOME's web browser didn't crash, I was told known bug and
too bad, you have to express a preference for Git and Mercurial
even if you don't want to. Strange take on democracy. I am
rather accustomed to the idea that declining to express a
preference for something is an acceptable form of voting.
Whatever)

 I explicitly did not want to chose Git or Mercurial, because I knew
 exactly what was going to happen. I've heard it several times already in
 #gnome-hackers and elsewhere:

so it seems the people who prefer Bazaar like Git as their
second choice, so surely it's ok to go with that. Great!
Decision made

 No. The rest of the survey was irrelevant. It was quite evident that the
 object of the exercise was to allow people to say lots of people said
 Git was either their first or second choice which sounds very
 impressive, and was exactly the one thing I did NOT want to support.

 So it crashed my browser. Nice.

That sucks.  Big time.

However, you'll be happy to know that most of my analyzing work was
originally performed on an alternative output file that included all
partial answers.  (It also contained a bit more data, such as svn
usernames -- and thus I can verify that your response was included in
this file and just did so.)  Now the reason this is relevant is that
when I got the final data in an alternate format from Behdad, I had
already generated all my plots and written my analysis.  So I had to
regenerate all the plots and compare old and new versions.  It turns
out the two sets were basically indistinguishable to my eye.  I spot
checked a couple of my claims in my analysis (e.g. that translators
preferred git over svn since it was so close in both data sets), but
actually didn't check them all.  Thus, you could say that my analysis
is more valid (or at least more verified) for the set of users that
also includes partial answers like yours.

On a related note, it looks like the total number of people who ranked
the various systems (taken from the data file including partial
answers) are:
  any: 581
  bzr: 585
  git: 583
  hg: 581
  svn: 582
So, yes, it looks like there were more people who left git unranked
than bzr -- the difference being two people.


However, I'm a bit confused by this statement:

   No. The rest of the survey was irrelevant. It was quite evident that the
   object of the exercise was to allow people to say lots of people said
   Git was either their first or second choice which sounds very

Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-05 Thread Max Kanat-Alexander

On Sun, 04 Jan 2009 17:40:18 -0500 David Zeuthen da...@fubar.dk wrote:
 Then what happens when a new version of git with a new feature,
 incompatible with the git-serve kludge, is released?

I don't know if you've talked to the git developers, but
they're very firmly against adding any new features to the git server.
It is supposed to do one thing and one thing only, and that's allow you
to clone from it. The server basically consists of a mechanism to
tarball a repository, send it over the wire, and untar it on the client
side.

-Max
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-05 Thread Max Kanat-Alexander

So, I'm not a GNOME contributor, but I am the author of VCI, a
Perl module that interacts with version control systems (currently CVS,
Svn, Hg, Git, and Bzr), and so I wanted to chime in a bit on this
thread.

The first thing to understand is that the git server protocol
is very simple. When I was writing VCI, I talked to the git developers
and asked if they were going to add any more features to the server.
They said no, it's only supposed to allow you to clone from it, and
that adding any other features would increase the attack surface (a
particularly valid concern when writing servers in C).

Now, I am a very definite bzr user, so that should be kept in
mind, but I also have a lot of experience with various VCSes, so I do
have somewhat of an objective viewpoint.

On Mon, 5 Jan 2009 07:00:52 -0700 Elijah Newren new...@gmail.com
wrote:
 * As James H. mentioned on John's blog, you'd likely end up with the
 intersection of the features of the two version control systems rather
 than improving things.

For most operations, no, that's not true. git does not do any
actual operations over the wire, it does all of its operations on your
local repository, so you wouldn't lose any git functionality, there.

 * John's bridge would have to be updated whenever either the bzr or
 git formats changed

Unless he uses bzrlib or calls the bzr/git binaries directly,
which I imagine he would?

 * It would introduce extra lag between when new features become
 available, since the bridge would need to be updated for each such
 change.

Well, there will be no new features in the git server. git
never works remotely, it always works locally. So that wouldn't be a
problem there.

 * I believe bzr proponents even admit that bzr is still slow for
 network operations.

It depends. It's more of a latency thing currently than
anything else. With a low-latency connection, I find it just as fast as
Git or Hg. And I haven't personally experienced the low-latency thing
recently, just heard reports.


One question that should also be considered in this whole
discussion is--what sysadmin is going to maintain the server? If you
can't get anybody who will actually *maintain* a Git repository (I mean,
you can point out tools or talk about it, but...) for the next 10 years
or so, then it'd be pretty hard to move to it. That includes
maintaining all the integration around the repository. Remember that
Git really has no API, you just run the commands and get the output.
*Subversion* actually had the best API when I was writing VCI, FWIW.
Git and CVS had the worst API, in terms of integration. There may be
better modules available now, though--I wrote VCI in 2007.

-Max
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-04 Thread Karl Lattimer


 Elijah Newren did an initial analysis of the data.  His analysis also includes
 the survey questions and answers.  Find it at:
 
   http://blogs.gnome.org/newren/2009/01/03/gnome-dvcs-survey-results/
 

This is pretty decent analysis going on here :) 

I'd like to remind people of John Carr's recent blog post too, someone 
mentioned in the survey results actually. JC has been working on bzr with git 
protocol support, which would fulfil many of the requirements for having a 
GNOME DVCS.

Happy new year everyone :)

BR,
 K

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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

On Sun, Jan 04, 2009 at 08:10:21AM -0600, Jason D. Clinton wrote:
  This is pretty decent analysis going on here :)
 
  I'd like to remind people of John Carr's recent blog post too, someone 
  mentioned in the survey results actually. JC has been working on bzr with 
  git protocol support, which would fulfil many of the requirements for 
  having a GNOME DVCS.
 
 
 I'd like to point out that--of the 15 people who regularly use git and
 bzr--git still won.

That isn't a contest. It is a survey.

 http://www.gnome.org/~shaunm/survey/first-picks-permutations.png It
 seems to me that a lot of brain power, sysadmin time, and general

I am a sysadmin and disagree with your notion that sysadmin time is
somehow saved. I'd rather asses such things myself. Further, sysadmin
time is not so important.

 proliferation of Things To Learn for New People(tm) can be saved if
 the six people (1.04% of respondents) who ranked bzr above git in that
 graph can just bite the bullet and admit that git won. Can we please

It is a survey. It is NOT about 'winning'.

 just all move on?

Further, your explanation is incomplete. As you said, the graph is about
people knowing two DVCS systems. I wouldn't say I knew 2. Those 6 are
incomplete.

Now before you reply: we have a clear need for git to work (ranked 1st
50% of the time, etc). But if you say move on, how do you think a
switch is made? Magic?

Anyway, I'd rather add John Carr to the sysadmin team. I plan to make a
proposal to switch GNOME to a DVCS where Git works using Johns
suggestion. Then other sysadmins[1] can suggest whatever proposal they
want. These proposals can be investigated on merit and then a one can be
chosen (chosen as in: go ahead and try if this would work, not go
ahead blindly; everything must be tested before a cutover).

[1] or whomever. Although I don't see how that would work.

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Olav
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 8:51 AM, Olav Vitters o...@bkor.dhs.org wrote:
 That isn't a contest. It is a survey.

Please don't read more in to my email than I intended. There's no need
to get defensive.


 http://www.gnome.org/~shaunm/survey/first-picks-permutations.png It
 seems to me that a lot of brain power, sysadmin time, and general

 I am a sysadmin and disagree with your notion that sysadmin time is
 somehow saved. I'd rather asses such things myself. Further, sysadmin
 time is not so important.

Thank you for voicing your opinion.


 just all move on?

 Further, your explanation is incomplete. As you said, the graph is about
 people knowing two DVCS systems. I wouldn't say I knew 2. Those 6 are
 incomplete.

I highlighted this statistical analysis because those 6 contain the
subset of  4 vocal users demanding that we /also/ support bzr.


 Now before you reply: we have a clear need for git to work (ranked 1st
 50% of the time, etc). But if you say move on, how do you think a
 switch is made? Magic?

Please don't be patronizing. I'm not an idiot.


 Anyway, I'd rather add John Carr to the sysadmin team. I plan to make a
 proposal to switch GNOME to a DVCS where Git works using Johns
 suggestion. Then other sysadmins[1] can suggest whatever proposal they
 want. These proposals can be investigated on merit and then a one can be
 chosen (chosen as in: go ahead and try if this would work, not go
 ahead blindly; everything must be tested before a cutover).

John's idea is a good one but it patently loses on technical merit. As
stated by John here, git will only be support in a degraded,
bastardized form because he chose bzr as the repository format:

http://blogs.gnome.org/johncarr/2008/12/11/dvcs-for-gnome/#comment-172

Are we really going to go back to the days of CVS where file moves
aren't supported?

It strikes me that this very vocal minority--John and Robert Carr,
Karl Lattimer and Rob Taylor (whom are four of the six people I
mentioned above)--are potentially delaying even longer what we've
wanted for more than two years, now. It is from these same people that
came the suggestion that git users were a rapid, vocal minority. Why
are we letting them derail this process?

Moving will not be easy, obviously. But doing it John's way will be,
in my technical analysis, an order of magnitude more painful.
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-04 Thread Robert Carr

Not to be hostile, but please don't accuse me of holding anything up  
or being a vocal minority. I have never spoken out, posted, or blogged  
about any of the DVCS decisions.


I think I said in the survey I would prefer bzr, however I didn't  
really care at the time (and much less since
Discovering git-rebase--interactive) and if I indicated otherwise,  
that was not intentional.


On Jan 4, 2009, at 10:40, Jason D. Clinton m...@jasonclinton.com  
wrote:


On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 8:51 AM, Olav Vitters o...@bkor.dhs.org  
wrote:

That isn't a contest. It is a survey.


Please don't read more in to my email than I intended. There's no need
to get defensive.


http://www.gnome.org/~shaunm/survey/first-picks-permutations.png  
It

seems to me that a lot of brain power, sysadmin time, and general


I am a sysadmin and disagree with your notion that sysadmin time is
somehow saved. I'd rather asses such things myself. Further, sysadmin
time is not so important.


Thank you for voicing your opinion.



just all move on?


Further, your explanation is incomplete. As you said, the graph is  
about

people knowing two DVCS systems. I wouldn't say I knew 2. Those 6 are
incomplete.


I highlighted this statistical analysis because those 6 contain the
subset of  4 vocal users demanding that we /also/ support bzr.


Now before you reply: we have a clear need for git to work (ranked  
1st

50% of the time, etc). But if you say move on, how do you think a
switch is made? Magic?


Please don't be patronizing. I'm not an idiot.


Anyway, I'd rather add John Carr to the sysadmin team. I plan to  
make a

proposal to switch GNOME to a DVCS where Git works using Johns
suggestion. Then other sysadmins[1] can suggest whatever proposal  
they
want. These proposals can be investigated on merit and then a one  
can be

chosen (chosen as in: go ahead and try if this would work, not go
ahead blindly; everything must be tested before a cutover).


John's idea is a good one but it patently loses on technical merit. As
stated by John here, git will only be support in a degraded,
bastardized form because he chose bzr as the repository format:

http://blogs.gnome.org/johncarr/2008/12/11/dvcs-for-gnome/#comment-172

Are we really going to go back to the days of CVS where file moves
aren't supported?

It strikes me that this very vocal minority--John and Robert Carr,
Karl Lattimer and Rob Taylor (whom are four of the six people I
mentioned above)--are potentially delaying even longer what we've
wanted for more than two years, now. It is from these same people that
came the suggestion that git users were a rapid, vocal minority. Why
are we letting them derail this process?

Moving will not be easy, obviously. But doing it John's way will be,
in my technical analysis, an order of magnitude more painful.
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-04 Thread John Carr

 Anyway, I'd rather add John Carr to the sysadmin team. I plan to make a
 proposal to switch GNOME to a DVCS where Git works using Johns
 suggestion. Then other sysadmins[1] can suggest whatever proposal they
 want. These proposals can be investigated on merit and then a one can be
 chosen (chosen as in: go ahead and try if this would work, not go
 ahead blindly; everything must be tested before a cutover).

 John's idea is a good one but it patently loses on technical merit. As
 stated by John here, git will only be support in a degraded,
 bastardized form because he chose bzr as the repository format:

 http://blogs.gnome.org/johncarr/2008/12/11/dvcs-for-gnome/#comment-172

 Are we really going to go back to the days of CVS where file moves
 aren't supported?

A git move operation is simply git rm  git add. By that reckoning
i'd either not be able to represent any deletes or any adds because of
that god damn impaired Bzr file format! Wow, i'd be so eager to share
that idea with the community ;)

The big deal here is that git uses a heuristic to say Foo is now
called Bar (selectively; its not done for speed in some cases). This
is not stored anywhere in the file format, git redetermines it (if it
wouldnt be too slow to do so). In Bazaar, its stored in the file
format. This means merge doesnt have to consider ancestry to know if 2
files are related, it just knows they are. Solution? We simply have to
run that heuristic ourselves so that Bazaar knows 2 files are related
at import time.

Git support is not degraded here, and Bazaar is no worse off than if
you had imported a Git project into Bazaar for the first time
(basically merge will work, but won't work *as* well in the rename
case).

I'm not a complete idiot - if it was going to be a degraded,
bastardized form of Git I wouldn't waste my time on it. I suppose I
might be an evil genius stalling for Bazaar DS9 to be written (sorry
for the very bad joke that probably only i get...).

 It strikes me that this very vocal minority--John and Robert Carr,
 Karl Lattimer and Rob Taylor (whom are four of the six people I
 mentioned above)--are potentially delaying even longer what we've
 wanted for more than two years, now. It is from these same people that
 came the suggestion that git users were a rapid, vocal minority. Why
 are we letting them derail this process?

This is not my 1st reply. The first one was fully of angry cow :().
Please dont single people out. I'm happy to have a hand wavy
discussion with you 1st person, IRL especially so. Also, KL and RT are
innocent.

As bkor has stated, there are lots of Git users so any implementation
will support you, and support you well. That is a requirement. So any
talk of my idea is not Git vs Bazaar, its talk of one way we can move
forward. So i dont consider it to be derailing. When mentioning my
idea, lets stick to technical problems with it rather than trying to
undermine anyone who has looked at it and thinks it is sound and
doable.

John
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

On Sun, Jan 04, 2009 at 09:40:33AM -0600, Jason D. Clinton wrote:
 On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 8:51 AM, Olav Vitters o...@bkor.dhs.org wrote:
  That isn't a contest. It is a survey.
 
 Please don't read more in to my email than I intended. There's no need
 to get defensive.

It is not defensive. I don't like changing a survey into 'winning' /
contest.

  http://www.gnome.org/~shaunm/survey/first-picks-permutations.png It
  seems to me that a lot of brain power, sysadmin time, and general
 
  I am a sysadmin and disagree with your notion that sysadmin time is
  somehow saved. I'd rather asses such things myself. Further, sysadmin
  time is not so important.
 
 Thank you for voicing your opinion.
 
 
  just all move on?
 
  Further, your explanation is incomplete. As you said, the graph is about
  people knowing two DVCS systems. I wouldn't say I knew 2. Those 6 are
  incomplete.
 
 I highlighted this statistical analysis because those 6 contain the
 subset of  4 vocal users demanding that we /also/ support bzr.

Yes, but then said 6. That is incomplete.

  Now before you reply: we have a clear need for git to work (ranked 1st
  50% of the time, etc). But if you say move on, how do you think a
  switch is made? Magic?
 
 Please don't be patronizing. I'm not an idiot.

You talk about moving on. I don't see anyone who'd do something like
that. My reply is that nothing will happen unless someone does
something real (not just another thread).

  Anyway, I'd rather add John Carr to the sysadmin team. I plan to make a
  proposal to switch GNOME to a DVCS where Git works using Johns
  suggestion. Then other sysadmins[1] can suggest whatever proposal they
  want. These proposals can be investigated on merit and then a one can be
  chosen (chosen as in: go ahead and try if this would work, not go
  ahead blindly; everything must be tested before a cutover).
 
 John's idea is a good one but it patently loses on technical merit. As
 stated by John here, git will only be support in a degraded,
 bastardized form because he chose bzr as the repository format:

I read his comment not in the same way. Bzr supports more, Git less.
However, I will less John answer... as that will be more concrete.

 http://blogs.gnome.org/johncarr/2008/12/11/dvcs-for-gnome/#comment-172
 
 Are we really going to go back to the days of CVS where file moves
 aren't supported?

Git doesn't do renames; instead applies heuristics. So this is applied.

 It strikes me that this very vocal minority--John and Robert Carr,
 Karl Lattimer and Rob Taylor (whom are four of the six people I
 mentioned above)--are potentially delaying even longer what we've
 wanted for more than two years, now. It is from these same people that
 came the suggestion that git users were a rapid, vocal minority. Why
 are we letting them derail this process?

Again, you're limiting it to 6 people. It is not about the six. This is
why I responded before. Instead, you use that number again. Even adding
people's names, I don't find this useful.

I am not going to talk about 'derailing'.. too emotional word.

 Moving will not be easy, obviously. But doing it John's way will be,
 in my technical analysis, an order of magnitude more painful.

His way is a solution I expect to be implemented in 2009. To be honest,
I really wonder if something else would happen that I'd qualify as a
good switch.

Yes, might be more difficult to implement. This is what can be
discussed. (Along with other migration proposals.)

-- 
Regards,
Olav
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 2:43 AM, Karl Lattimer k...@qdh.org.uk wrote:
 Elijah Newren did an initial analysis of the data.  His analysis also 
 includes
 the survey questions and answers.  Find it at:

   http://blogs.gnome.org/newren/2009/01/03/gnome-dvcs-survey-results/


 This is pretty decent analysis going on here :)

 I'd like to remind people of John Carr's recent blog post too, someone 
 mentioned in the survey results actually. JC has been working on bzr with git 
 protocol support, which would fulfil many of the requirements for having a 
 GNOME DVCS.


I'd like to point out that--of the 15 people who regularly use git and
bzr--git still won.
http://www.gnome.org/~shaunm/survey/first-picks-permutations.png It
seems to me that a lot of brain power, sysadmin time, and general
proliferation of Things To Learn for New People(tm) can be saved if
the six people (1.04% of respondents) who ranked bzr above git in that
graph can just bite the bullet and admit that git won. Can we please
just all move on?

My fear is that this effort to keep bzr on life support will cause bzr
to show up as a requirement in distcheck for modules maintained by
people who are still holding out.
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 11:48 AM, John Carr john.c...@unrouted.co.uk wrote:
 I'm not a complete idiot - if it was going to be a degraded,
 bastardized form of Git I wouldn't waste my time on it. I suppose I
 might be an evil genius stalling for Bazaar DS9 to be written (sorry
 for the very bad joke that probably only i get...).

I don't think you're an idiot. I think you're quite smart.

Can you please tell us exactly what your words, This is a price that
a maintainer pays for using Git and one reason why eventually they
might decide to (and have the option to) switch to using Bazaar, mean
and to which git features you are planning on this statement applying
to encourage people to use bzr?

Or do you mean that you taking that sentence back?

Also, can you tell us if Canonical is directing you to work on this?
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-04 Thread Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro

On Sat, 2009-01-03 at 22:46 -0500, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
 In December I ran a distributed version control system survey for GNOME.
 From the survey opening page:
 
   Thank you for taking the GNOME DVCS Survey.  This survey is run on behalf
   of the GNOME Foundation board of directors, release team, and sysadmin team.
   The GNOME project is planning a possible move from SVN to a distributed
   version control system in 2009.  The contenders for the system to use are
   bzr, git, and hg.  The aim of the survey is to help us better understand
   familiarity and preferences of our active contributor base regarding the
   future version control system for GNOME.  The survey results will be
   informational and will be sent to foundation-list and desktop-devel-list
   upon completion.
 
 GNOME contributors with an SVN account who had an SSH key installed on their
 account were invited to fill in the survey.  A total of 1083 account holders
 were invited, and 579 filled in the survey.  The survey results are now
 available to the public:
 
   http://www.gnome.org/~behdad/dvcs-survey/
 
 Elijah Newren did an initial analysis of the data.  His analysis also includes
 the survey questions and answers.  Find it at:
 
   http://blogs.gnome.org/newren/2009/01/03/gnome-dvcs-survey-results/
 
 If you analyze the results, please reply to this thread and also leave a
 comment on my blog post linking to your analysis:
 
   http://mces.blogspot.com/2009/01/gnome-dvcs-survey.html


Just in case I am forced to switch to git in the future (being open
minded here, although I prefer bazaar), does someone have any advice how
to generate a nice GNU style ChangeLog (like what emacs produces) from
git commit logs?  I know that some projects like Cairo auto-generate
ChangeLog already, but the default git changelog format is too
detailed/ugly IMHO.

-- 
Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro
g...@inescporto.pt gust...@users.sourceforge.net
The universe is always one step beyond logic -- Frank Herbert

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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-04 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo

On 1/4/09, Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro g...@inescporto.pt wrote:

 Just in case I am forced to switch to git in the future (being open
  minded here, although I prefer bazaar), does someone have any advice how
  to generate a nice GNU style ChangeLog (like what emacs produces) from
  git commit logs?  I know that some projects like Cairo auto-generate
  ChangeLog already, but the default git changelog format is too
  detailed/ugly IMHO.


On a side note here, I recalled being against dropping ChangeLogs in
projects in favour of commit messages. But now I love it and I realize
that my main problem was that with SVN I *needed* the ChangeLog since
that was the *only way* I could quickly read the project history, svn
log took ages and was ugly.
Now with giggle or git command line utils it's trivial to watch
differences and read commit messages. On top of that we used to copy
the exact same text from the ChangeLog entry into the commit message,
which was pretty useless but necessary because of SVN limitations (now
this is a vague comment, don't flame me).

I'm not saying that ChangeLogs are useless, just commenting a little
experience I had. Again, just a side note.

greetings!
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-04 Thread Wouter Bolsterlee

2009-01-04 klockan 15:10 skrev Jason D. Clinton:
 I'd like to point out that--of the 15 people who regularly use git and
 bzr--git still won.

Two remarks.

First remark: In the survey I answered that I do not really know much about
git, and that I do not use it often. This has a reason, which I haven't seen
anyone take into account: the few times I *did* try to use git it was an
utterly frustrating experience, and I gave up pretty much immediately.
(In contrast, the bzr experience has been a lot better: many good tutorials,
better error messages and help from the command line tool, a friendly and
active community, developers who actually *do* care about their users, and a
clean, extensible design with great plugins floating around.)

Second remark: a survey is never about ‘winning’ or ‘losing’.

— Wouter


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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

On Sun, 2009-01-04 at 17:48 +, John Carr wrote:
 As bkor has stated, there are lots of Git users so any implementation
 will support you, and support you well. That is a requirement. So any
 talk of my idea is not Git vs Bazaar, its talk of one way we can move
 forward. So i dont consider it to be derailing. When mentioning my
 idea, lets stick to technical problems with it rather than trying to
 undermine anyone who has looked at it and thinks it is sound and
 doable.

Can you explain what would happen in the event that a future version of
git switches to an repository format that isn't compatible with how you
want to store data?

 David


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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 3:01 PM, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) zee...@gmail.com wrote:
  How about we set-up a task-force of volunteers who would want to
 help in the move, each volunteer promising at least 3 hours a week? 3
 hours is a very small amount of time but I am hoping that we'll be
 able to gather at least 10 volunteers and together we can do it, even
 using our spare time.

I can commit that much time as long as there's clear delegation of
work by--preferably--the sysadmin team. I don't want to sit on a
committee that does a lot of deciding and no actual doing.
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-04 Thread Matthias Clasen

On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 3:59 PM, David Zeuthen da...@fubar.dk wrote:
 On Sun, 2009-01-04 at 17:48 +, John Carr wrote:
 As bkor has stated, there are lots of Git users so any implementation
 will support you, and support you well. That is a requirement. So any
 talk of my idea is not Git vs Bazaar, its talk of one way we can move
 forward. So i dont consider it to be derailing. When mentioning my
 idea, lets stick to technical problems with it rather than trying to
 undermine anyone who has looked at it and thinks it is sound and
 doable.

 Can you explain what would happen in the event that a future version of
 git switches to an repository format that isn't compatible with how you
 want to store data?

It seems pretty clear to me that any 'homegrown' system like this is
not suitable as a longterm, stable solution for a project the size of
gnome.
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-04 Thread Rui Tiago Cação Matos

2009/1/4 Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro g...@inescporto.pt:
 Just in case I am forced to switch to git in the future (being open
 minded here, although I prefer bazaar), does someone have any advice how
 to generate a nice GNU style ChangeLog (like what emacs produces) from
 git commit logs?  I know that some projects like Cairo auto-generate
 ChangeLog already, but the default git changelog format is too
 detailed/ugly IMHO.


Actually, now that I looked, gnulib also has what you request[1].

Rui

[1] 
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=gnulib.git;a=blob;f=build-aux/gitlog-to-changelog;h=0a94b9e8ba1e26ad24a535ec57f39797aac78c12;hb=HEAD
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-04 Thread Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)

Hi!

On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 6:06 PM, Olav Vitters o...@bkor.dhs.org wrote:
 On Sun, Jan 04, 2009 at 09:40:33AM -0600, Jason D. Clinton wrote:
 On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 8:51 AM, Olav Vitters o...@bkor.dhs.org wrote:
 Moving will not be easy, obviously. But doing it John's way will be,
 in my technical analysis, an order of magnitude more painful.

 His way is a solution I expect to be implemented in 2009.

  No matter how good that sounds, it's still not a solution, it's a
workaround to the problem that we don't have (human) resources to do a
move to git.

 To be honest,
 I really wonder if something else would happen that I'd qualify as a
 good switch.

  How about we set-up a task-force of volunteers who would want to
help in the move, each volunteer promising at least 3 hours a week? 3
hours is a very small amount of time but I am hoping that we'll be
able to gather at least 10 volunteers and together we can do it, even
using our spare time.

  In any case, after looking at the results of the survey we should
only look at hybrid/dual proposal like John's when we don't find any
way of moving to git in a reasonable amount of time ( 6 months).

-- 
Regards,

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)
FSF member#5124
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

On Sun, 2009-01-04 at 23:01 +0200, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) wrote:
   How about we set-up a task-force of volunteers who would want to
 help in the move, each volunteer promising at least 3 hours a week? 3
 hours is a very small amount of time but I am hoping that we'll be
 able to gather at least 10 volunteers and together we can do it, even
 using our spare time.

Would it be worth investigating whether it's worth having the Foundation
pay someone to help with this migration (planning, executing, maybe even
hosting etc.)? I mean, the eco-system around git is huge (github and
others comes to mind) and growing... I'm pretty sure there's plenty git
experts around.

 David


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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 3:27 PM, Olav Vitters o...@bkor.dhs.org wrote:
 I can commit that much time as long as there's clear delegation of
 work by--preferably--the sysadmin team. I don't want to sit on a
 committee that does a lot of deciding and no actual doing.

 What do you mean with delegation?

 Which do you mean: (yes, exaggerating)
  - Hey, do the switch, hopefully it'll work out in the end?
  - Run this command, then this one, then that

More of a, Given this requirement, you find a solution to this
specific problem. Report back in a week and ask for help if you get
stuck, where solution may involve writing code in the form of
post-commit hooks.
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-04 Thread Frederic Peters

David Zeuthen wrote:

 On Sun, 2009-01-04 at 17:48 +, John Carr wrote:
  As bkor has stated, there are lots of Git users so any implementation
  will support you, and support you well. That is a requirement. So any
  talk of my idea is not Git vs Bazaar, its talk of one way we can move
  forward. So i dont consider it to be derailing. When mentioning my
  idea, lets stick to technical problems with it rather than trying to
  undermine anyone who has looked at it and thinks it is sound and
  doable.
 
 Can you explain what would happen in the event that a future version of
 git switches to an repository format that isn't compatible with how you
 want to store data?

Probably just like bzr already went through several repository formats
and allowed easy upgrades (just like Subversion repository format
changed and it didn't cause any problem for users).  I don't think
there is a problem here.

And also, data would be available in native git format on lots of
computers, and could always be pushed to a vanilla git server.


Frederic

[Disclaimer: this is just my understanding of the proposal, I may be
 wrong and corrected by anybody.]
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-04 Thread Luca Ferretti

Il giorno dom, 04/01/2009 alle 16.11 -0500, Matthias Clasen ha scritto:

 It seems pretty clear to me that any 'homegrown' system like this is
 not suitable as a longterm, stable solution for a project the size of
 gnome.

BTW, once switched to DVCS, how much disk space I should have in order
to perform a full GNOME Desktop build with jhbuild? A WebKit build from
git needs ~740MB :-/

People using JHBuild to develop one project against latest code or
simply testing the whole desktop don't need the full history for all
GNOME Desktop modules

bzr allows lightweight checkouts [1]. What about git?


[1]
http://doc.bazaar-vcs.org/bzr.dev/en/user-guide/index.html#getting-a-lightweight-checkout

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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 3:47 PM, Luca Ferretti elle@libero.it wrote:
 bzr allows lightweight checkouts [1]. What about git?

Yes, it does. This is not an issue.
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-04 Thread Marko Anastasov

On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 10:47 PM, Luca Ferretti elle@libero.it wrote:
 People using JHBuild to develop one project against latest code or
 simply testing the whole desktop don't need the full history for all
 GNOME Desktop modules

 bzr allows lightweight checkouts [1]. What about git?

git-clone has a --depth option [0] to perform shallow clones up to
a certain number of revisions.

   Marko

[0] http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-clone.html
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-04 Thread Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)

On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 11:47 PM, Luca Ferretti elle@libero.it wrote:
 Il giorno dom, 04/01/2009 alle 16.11 -0500, Matthias Clasen ha scritto:

 It seems pretty clear to me that any 'homegrown' system like this is
 not suitable as a longterm, stable solution for a project the size of
 gnome.

 BTW, once switched to DVCS, how much disk space I should have in order
 to perform a full GNOME Desktop build with jhbuild? A WebKit build from
 git needs ~740MB :-/

  How much does it consume if it's a svn checkout? I heard (don't know
if it's true or not) git repo usually takes less diskspace then svn
checkout. This page seems to support this claim:

http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/GitSvnComparsion

An SVN working directory always contains two copies of each file: one
for the user to actually work with and another hidden in .svn/ to aid
operations such as status, diff and commit. In contrast a Git working
directory requires only one small index file that stores about 100
bytes of data per tracked file. On projects with a large number of
files this can be a substantial difference in the disk space required
per working copy.

-- 
Regards,

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)
FSF member#5124
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

On Sun, 2009-01-04 at 22:47 +0100, Frederic Peters wrote:
 Probably just like bzr already went through several repository formats
 and allowed easy upgrades (just like Subversion repository format
 changed and it didn't cause any problem for users).  I don't think
 there is a problem here.

I don't find this answer compelling. At all. It also doesn't answer the
question. It's not unlikely that a future git repo format is
fundamentally incompatible with current or future bzr repo formats.

 And also, data would be available in native git format on lots of
 computers, and could always be pushed to a vanilla git server.

Someone really got to explain exactly why support for multiple
repository formats is desirable.

First, it only makes it much harder for users to grasp; we're going to
end up with some projects have l.g.o pages / README files / mailing list
messages saying use bzr to check out this branch and others saying the
same for git. That's *not* desirable; it makes it so much harder for new
contributors.

Second, it also makes it harder to set up things like jhbuild; either
you end up pulling from both git and bzr (from the same underlying repo)
or you end up mentally having to translate branch names etc. from one
system to another. This is error prone.

Third, I could go on with examples, just consider the set of webtools
(cgit, annotation, source code searching etc.) we end up with on
dvcs.gnome.org; some would be built against bzr, others against git. You
get inconsistent branch names, you end up overloading contributors with
different concepts and so forth.

Finally: We're talking about people's data here. The first rule of
holding peoples data is that you don't screw around with it just
because. Data integrity matters. Keeping things simple and staying with
a *single* kind of hammer (instead of a weird homegrown mutant hammer)
helps here. Otherwise we end up with data loss. Frankly, I'm concerned
that some people are even considering using such homegrown kludges for
holding our GNOME source code.

 David


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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-04 Thread Luca Ferretti

Il giorno dom, 04/01/2009 alle 23.58 +0200, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) ha
scritto:
 On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 11:47 PM, Luca Ferretti elle@libero.it wrote:
  Il giorno dom, 04/01/2009 alle 16.11 -0500, Matthias Clasen ha scritto:
 
  It seems pretty clear to me that any 'homegrown' system like this is
  not suitable as a longterm, stable solution for a project the size of
  gnome.
 
  BTW, once switched to DVCS, how much disk space I should have in order
  to perform a full GNOME Desktop build with jhbuild? A WebKit build from
  git needs ~740MB :-/
 
   How much does it consume if it's a svn checkout? 

Note that 740MB is the size of source stuff + build stuff (moreover, but
I'm not sure, WebKit duplicates some source file at build time).

The size of fresh checkout is 575MB (see attached file for `du -ch`
details)
8.0K./.git/refs/heads
4.0K./.git/refs/tags
16K ./.git/refs/remotes/origin
20K ./.git/refs/remotes
40K ./.git/refs
4.0K./.git/branches
8.0K./.git/info
48K ./.git/hooks
456M./.git/objects/pack
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-04 Thread Frederic Peters

Jason D. Clinton wrote:

 On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 3:47 PM, Luca Ferretti elle@libero.it wrote:
  bzr allows lightweight checkouts [1]. What about git?
 
 Yes, it does. This is not an issue.

I think non-git users already knows that git can do everything™, but
they would learn about git ways faster if you pointed to explanations
(just like Marko did).


Frederic
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-04 Thread Robin Sonefors

On sön, 2009-01-04 at 23:58 +0200, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) wrote:
 On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 11:47 PM, Luca Ferretti elle@libero.it wrote:
  Il giorno dom, 04/01/2009 alle 16.11 -0500, Matthias Clasen ha scritto:
 
  It seems pretty clear to me that any 'homegrown' system like this is
  not suitable as a longterm, stable solution for a project the size of
  gnome.
 
  BTW, once switched to DVCS, how much disk space I should have in order
  to perform a full GNOME Desktop build with jhbuild? A WebKit build from
  git needs ~740MB :-/
 
   How much does it consume if it's a svn checkout? I heard (don't know
 if it's true or not) git repo usually takes less diskspace then svn
 checkout. This page seems to support this claim:

A complete git repo is usually smaller than a complete SVN one
(according to common knowlege - as in, I didn't run any benchmarks),
but one commonly only checks out the /trunk subdirectory in subversion,
while git usually checks out the whole project history, including all
branches - it could be a substantial amount of data you don't check out
with SVN.

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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-04 Thread Sebastian Pölsterl

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

Matthias Clasen schrieb:
 On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 3:59 PM, David Zeuthen da...@fubar.dk wrote:
 On Sun, 2009-01-04 at 17:48 +, John Carr wrote:
 As bkor has stated, there are lots of Git users so any implementation
 will support you, and support you well. That is a requirement. So any
 talk of my idea is not Git vs Bazaar, its talk of one way we can move
 forward. So i dont consider it to be derailing. When mentioning my
 idea, lets stick to technical problems with it rather than trying to
 undermine anyone who has looked at it and thinks it is sound and
 doable.
 Can you explain what would happen in the event that a future version of
 git switches to an repository format that isn't compatible with how you
 want to store data?
 
 It seems pretty clear to me that any 'homegrown' system like this is
 not suitable as a longterm, stable solution for a project the size of
 gnome.

I totally agree. Sooner or later it will become a nightmare to maintain.

- --
Greetings,
Sebastian Pölsterl
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-04 Thread Ali Sabil

On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 11:05 PM, David Zeuthen da...@fubar.dk wrote:

 On Sun, 2009-01-04 at 22:47 +0100, Frederic Peters wrote:
  Probably just like bzr already went through several repository formats
  and allowed easy upgrades (just like Subversion repository format
  changed and it didn't cause any problem for users).  I don't think
  there is a problem here.

 I don't find this answer compelling. At all. It also doesn't answer the
 question. It's not unlikely that a future git repo format is
 fundamentally incompatible with current or future bzr repo formats.



  And also, data would be available in native git format on lots of
  computers, and could always be pushed to a vanilla git server.

 Someone really got to explain exactly why support for multiple
 repository formats is desirable.


To put it straight: the git repository format is not as awesome as people
want to believe.


 First, it only makes it much harder for users to grasp; we're going to
 end up with some projects have l.g.o pages / README files / mailing list
 messages saying use bzr to check out this branch and others saying the
 same for git. That's *not* desirable; it makes it so much harder for new
 contributors.


That's not what John's proposal is about ! John wants to use the bzr format
as a repository format, and add a git-serve plugin to bzr to be able to
talk to the git clients. In other words, you will be able to access the
same data using either bzr, git or hg.



 Second, it also makes it harder to set up things like jhbuild; either
 you end up pulling from both git and bzr (from the same underlying repo)
 or you end up mentally having to translate branch names etc. from one
 system to another. This is error prone.

 Third, I could go on with examples, just consider the set of webtools
 (cgit, annotation, source code searching etc.) we end up with on
 dvcs.gnome.org; some would be built against bzr, others against git. You
 get inconsistent branch names, you end up overloading contributors with
 different concepts and so forth.

 Finally: We're talking about people's data here. The first rule of
 holding peoples data is that you don't screw around with it just
 because. Data integrity matters. Keeping things simple and staying with
 a *single* kind of hammer (instead of a weird homegrown mutant hammer)
 helps here. Otherwise we end up with data loss. Frankly, I'm concerned
 that some people are even considering using such homegrown kludges for
 holding our GNOME source code.


Comparing the size of the Bazaar unit tests with those of Git, I would
certainly choose Bazaar for storing my data.

Cheers,

--
Ali
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-04 Thread Frederic Peters

David Zeuthen wrote:

 I don't find this answer compelling. At all. It also doesn't answer the
 question. It's not unlikely that a future git repo format is
 fundamentally incompatible with current or future bzr repo formats.

Just like I noted it was just an understanding of John's proposal;
because I feel it has value and thought it was dismissed a bit too
fast.  But I won't make suppositions again on the technicalities.


Frederic
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-04 Thread Cody Russell

On Sun, 2009-01-04 at 23:16 +0100, Robin Sonefors wrote:
How much does it consume if it's a svn checkout? I heard (don't
 know
  if it's true or not) git repo usually takes less diskspace then svn
  checkout. This page seems to support this claim:
 
 A complete git repo is usually smaller than a complete SVN one
 (according to common knowlege - as in, I didn't run any benchmarks),
 but one commonly only checks out the /trunk subdirectory in
 subversion,
 while git usually checks out the whole project history, including all
 branches - it could be a substantial amount of data you don't check
 out
 with SVN.

I think Zeeshan is talking about working copies, not repositories.  An
svn working copy stores two complete copies of each file in the repo;
one is the one that you see and edit, and one is in .svn/text-base

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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-04 Thread Ali Sabil

On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 11:16 PM, Robin Sonefors ozam...@flukkost.nu wrote:

 On sön, 2009-01-04 at 23:58 +0200, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) wrote:
  On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 11:47 PM, Luca Ferretti elle@libero.it
 wrote:
   Il giorno dom, 04/01/2009 alle 16.11 -0500, Matthias Clasen ha scritto:
  
   It seems pretty clear to me that any 'homegrown' system like this is
   not suitable as a longterm, stable solution for a project the size of
   gnome.
  
   BTW, once switched to DVCS, how much disk space I should have in order
   to perform a full GNOME Desktop build with jhbuild? A WebKit build from
   git needs ~740MB :-/
 
How much does it consume if it's a svn checkout? I heard (don't know
  if it's true or not) git repo usually takes less diskspace then svn
  checkout. This page seems to support this claim:

 A complete git repo is usually smaller than a complete SVN one
 (according to common knowlege - as in, I didn't run any benchmarks),
 but one commonly only checks out the /trunk subdirectory in subversion,
 while git usually checks out the whole project history, including all
 branches - it could be a substantial amount of data you don't check out
 with SVN.


Well,

Actually the quotes from the GitSvnComparsion page are very misleading, it
is true that a git working directory needs less space than an svn working
directory, it is also true that a git repository is smaller than an svn
repository. The main difference is that with git, you *clone* a repository,
and then create a working directory out of it, so you need sizeof(repo) +
sizeof(git-working-directory) on your hard disk, while with svn, all what
you need is sizeof(svn-working-directory).
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

On Sun, 2009-01-04 at 23:20 +0100, Ali Sabil wrote:
 First, it only makes it much harder for users to grasp; we're
 going to
 end up with some projects have l.g.o pages / README files /
 mailing list
 messages saying use bzr to check out this branch and others
 saying the
 same for git. That's *not* desirable; it makes it so much
 harder for new
 contributors.
 
 That's not what John's proposal is about ! John wants to use the bzr
 format as a repository format, and add a git-serve plugin to bzr to be
 able to talk to the git clients. In other words, you will be able to
 access the same data using either bzr, git or hg.

Uh, but that's exactly how I understood the proposal and I believe that
the points I made (that you didn't respond to) still stands: That it's
crazy to officially want to support git, bzr and hg *at* the same time
*from* the same repo. It's just asking for trouble.

 Finally: We're talking about people's data here. The first
 rule of
 holding peoples data is that you don't screw around with it
 just
 because. Data integrity matters. Keeping things simple and
 staying with
 a *single* kind of hammer (instead of a weird homegrown mutant
 hammer)
 helps here. Otherwise we end up with data loss. Frankly, I'm
 concerned
 that some people are even considering using such homegrown
 kludges for
 holding our GNOME source code.
 
 
 Comparing the size of the Bazaar unit tests with those of Git, I would
 certainly choose Bazaar for storing my data.

I wasn't commenting on bzr vs git storage format; I'm sure either is
fine. I was commenting on the fact that someone proposes to inject
something like git-serve in the middle; that's what I think is a kludge.

 David



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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

On Sun, Jan 04, 2009 at 05:29:02PM -0500, David Zeuthen wrote:
 Uh, but that's exactly how I understood the proposal and I believe that
 the points I made (that you didn't respond to) still stands: That it's
 crazy to officially want to support git, bzr and hg *at* the same time
 *from* the same repo. It's just asking for trouble.

That isn't true. It is Bzr on server, with Git support. Nothing about
Hg, nothing about doing partly Git, partly Bzr.

-- 
Regards,
Olav
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

On Sun, 2009-01-04 at 23:33 +0100, Olav Vitters wrote:
 On Sun, Jan 04, 2009 at 05:29:02PM -0500, David Zeuthen wrote:
  Uh, but that's exactly how I understood the proposal and I believe that
  the points I made (that you didn't respond to) still stands: That it's
  crazy to officially want to support git, bzr and hg *at* the same time
  *from* the same repo. It's just asking for trouble.
 
 That isn't true. It is Bzr on server, with Git support. Nothing about
 Hg, nothing about doing partly Git, partly Bzr.

Then what happens when a new version of git with a new feature,
incompatible with the git-serve kludge, is released? Then we're screwed,
right? And who gets to pay? We do. We're stuck with an old version of
git. Us. The very same people who very clearly said git, not bzr.

Is it *really* so hard to understand that this whole git-serve is a
terrible idea?

 David


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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

On Sun, Jan 04, 2009 at 11:37:05PM +0100, Patryk Zawadzki wrote:
 On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 11:33 PM, Olav Vitters o...@bkor.dhs.org wrote:
  On Sun, Jan 04, 2009 at 05:29:02PM -0500, David Zeuthen wrote:
  Uh, but that's exactly how I understood the proposal and I believe that
  the points I made (that you didn't respond to) still stands: That it's
  crazy to officially want to support git, bzr and hg *at* the same time
  *from* the same repo. It's just asking for trouble.
  That isn't true. It is Bzr on server, with Git support. Nothing about
  Hg, nothing about doing partly Git, partly Bzr.
 
 The potential problem I see is all of the remote branches will use
 different DVCS that do not support git + hg + bzr. So eventually all

Again: No Hg.

 of us will be forced to use all three tools in order to merge changes
 from remote branches (unless we expect *all* people to provide *all*
 changes as patches in which case I don't see the real gain of
 switching to a distributed tool).

Interesting point. I actually saw it as a benefit (store locally using
whatever you like). On GNOME server (personal stuff), doesn't matter.
Anyway, if you're going against the maintainer who wants to merge, too
bad for you IMO.

-- 
Regards,
Olav
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-04 Thread Ali Sabil

On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 11:33 PM, Olav Vitters o...@bkor.dhs.org wrote:

 On Sun, Jan 04, 2009 at 05:29:02PM -0500, David Zeuthen wrote:
  Uh, but that's exactly how I understood the proposal and I believe that
  the points I made (that you didn't respond to) still stands: That it's
  crazy to officially want to support git, bzr and hg *at* the same time
  *from* the same repo. It's just asking for trouble.

 That isn't true. It is Bzr on server, with Git support. Nothing about
 Hg, nothing about doing partly Git, partly Bzr.


Sorry for not being clear in my explanations. Basically, as Olav pointed
out, it is about having Bazaar on the server, with a git-serve plugin
allowing it to fulfill the git client requests as well as the bzr client
requests.

The following scenarios will be possible:
(bzr repo) - (git serve plugin) - network --- (git client)
(bzr repo) - (bzr serve) - network --- (bzr client)

both bzr and git will operate fully, nothing will be partially supported,
since the bazaar repository format is a superset of the git repo format (ie.
it stores more metadata).

I talked about hg, just to highlight that the solution is quite future
proof, because you can certainly apply the same solution to allow hg clients
to access the repository.

cheers,

--
Ali
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-04 Thread Johannes Schmid

Hi!

 It seems pretty clear to me that any 'homegrown' system like this is
 not suitable as a longterm, stable solution for a project the size of
 gnome.

I totally agree here! This is simply a problem of QA. If someone writes
a system that can serve all possible (D)VCS clients that's fine but this
won't happen tommorow and I will need a huge amount of time to be
finished and tested. And in addition it's unlikely that such a system
will support more than a common subset of the features of the underlying
DVCS system.

First, be honest, we need to decide which system to use. I have no
preference here, the survey says that most current users prefer git. So
it sounds reasonable to go that way if it doesn't has to much
problematic impact on the infrastructure side.

Second, a VCS system is something that just has to work. I doubt many
people really care a lot about what system they use as long as it does
not cause any problems for them. People familiar to git will easily
learn bzr and the bzr-people will learn git. It's not a good idea to
make this decision too important and to do flame-wars. Probably all
major DVCS fit our needs and it is more a matter of taste. The survey
was a good point to find out the taste of the GNOME developers = we
should accept that.

Regards
Johannes
 


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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

On Sun, 2009-01-04 at 23:58 +0100, Olav Vitters wrote:
 On Sun, Jan 04, 2009 at 05:40:18PM -0500, David Zeuthen wrote:
  Is it *really* so hard to understand that this whole git-serve is a
  terrible idea?
 
 You expect me to reply to this??!?

I expected you to reply to the other three mails where I asked the same
thing as I did in the mail you replied to. Oh, you chose not to quote
that; here it is again:

 Then what happens when a new version of git with a new feature,
 incompatible with the git-serve kludge, is released? Then we're
 screwed, right? And who gets to pay? We do. We're stuck with an old
 version of git. Us. The very same people who very clearly said git,
 not bzr.

But, alas, you didn't reply to this. You instead hand-waved about
something else. I don't think I breached any code of conduct, written or
otherwise, by displaying my frustration about how you are evading my
question.

David


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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

On Mon, Jan 05, 2009 at 12:04:30AM +0100, Johannes Schmid wrote:
 Hi!
 
  It seems pretty clear to me that any 'homegrown' system like this is
  not suitable as a longterm, stable solution for a project the size of
  gnome.
 
 I totally agree here! This is simply a problem of QA. If someone writes
 a system that can serve all possible (D)VCS clients that's fine but this

That is not what is proposed.

 won't happen tommorow and I will need a huge amount of time to be
 finished and tested. And in addition it's unlikely that such a system

Proposed solution doesn't take a long time to finish.

 will support more than a common subset of the features of the underlying
 DVCS system.

[..]
 Second, a VCS system is something that just has to work. I doubt many
 people really care a lot about what system they use as long as it does

No need to guess, we can look at the survey.

-- 
Regards,
Olav
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-04 Thread Emmanuele Bassi

On Sun, 2009-01-04 at 17:40 -0500, David Zeuthen wrote:
 On Sun, 2009-01-04 at 23:33 +0100, Olav Vitters wrote:
  On Sun, Jan 04, 2009 at 05:29:02PM -0500, David Zeuthen wrote:
   Uh, but that's exactly how I understood the proposal and I believe that
   the points I made (that you didn't respond to) still stands: That it's
   crazy to officially want to support git, bzr and hg *at* the same time
   *from* the same repo. It's just asking for trouble.
  
  That isn't true. It is Bzr on server, with Git support. Nothing about
  Hg, nothing about doing partly Git, partly Bzr.
 
 Then what happens when a new version of git with a new feature,
 incompatible with the git-serve kludge, is released? Then we're screwed,
 right? And who gets to pay? We do. We're stuck with an old version of
 git. Us. The very same people who very clearly said git, not bzr.
 
 Is it *really* so hard to understand that this whole git-serve is a
 terrible idea?

more importantly: is it *really* so hard to understand that if you want
a bzr storage for git you should probably propose it upstream instead of
writing something ad hoc for GNOME alone? if the idea has any merit[0]
then it should be pushed upstream -- even as an optional repository
format.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

[0] I'm reasonably sure it has some. not as the one proposed to avoid
pissing off somebody somewhere because we want to be inclusive -- no,
lemme rephrase that: we are *fucking afraid of committment*. seriously:
an abstraction over DVCS? what have we become? are we *ever* going make
*any* decision about *anything*? this is actually a larger issue with
the GNOME community: we are being afraid.

-- 
Emmanuele Bassi,
W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.net
B: http://log.emmanuelebassi.net

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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

On Sun, Jan 04, 2009 at 06:05:30PM -0500, David Zeuthen wrote:
 On Sun, 2009-01-04 at 23:58 +0100, Olav Vitters wrote:
  On Sun, Jan 04, 2009 at 05:40:18PM -0500, David Zeuthen wrote:
   Is it *really* so hard to understand that this whole git-serve is a
   terrible idea?
  
  You expect me to reply to this??!?
 
 I expected you to reply to the other three mails where I asked the same
 thing as I did in the mail you replied to. Oh, you chose not to quote
 that; here it is again:

I chose not to quote that yes, as this is getting too personal for me.
However, I only get more replies back which I consider of terrible
quality.

  Then what happens when a new version of git with a new feature,
  incompatible with the git-serve kludge, is released? Then we're
  screwed, right? And who gets to pay? We do. We're stuck with an old
  version of git. Us. The very same people who very clearly said git,
  not bzr.
 
 But, alas, you didn't reply to this. You instead hand-waved about
 something else. I don't think I breached any code of conduct, written or
 otherwise, by displaying my frustration about how you are evading my
 question.

I am not evading. Stop trying to make this personal. I don't care about
CoC, I don't like you're talking to me.


Anyway, I've already asked John to respond to your point as he is doing
the work. I did that before replying to you. This as I thought he would
give the best answer.
My answer: well, AFAIK, the communication stuff is very generic, so
breakage is unlikely. Further, that is why John becomes a sysadmin. Feel
free to rewrite my answer as needed.

-- 
Regards,
Olav
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-04 Thread Josselin Mouette

Le lundi 05 janvier 2009 à 00:04 +0100, Johannes Schmid a écrit :
 I totally agree here! This is simply a problem of QA. If someone writes
 a system that can serve all possible (D)VCS clients that's fine but this
 won't happen tommorow

No, it already happened and it is called Subversion. This is the only
repository format that all major DVCS clients can talk to.

-- 
 .''`.
: :' :  We are debian.org. Lower your prices, surrender your code.
`. `'   We will add your hardware and software distinctiveness to
  `-our own. Resistance is futile.


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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results