#160: Proposal to use GitHub instead of trac
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Reporter: jonathan | Owner: cf-conventions@…
Type: task | Status: new
Priority: medium | Milestone:
Component: cf-conventions | Version:
Resolution: | Keywords:
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Comment (by apamment):
I've been following the discussion in this ticket with interest.
I support the move to Github as a forum to manage proposals for changes to
the conventions document. Since the document now resides on Github, along
with the pages that form the CF website, there seems little reason to
retain trac as an additional technology for discussing issues. Signing up
for a Github account is a very simple process and one does not need to be
an expert in git/Github to open issues or comment on them. Considering
that the discussions tend to involve a relatively small number of
contributors I think it is reasonable to ask them to obtain a Github
account for this purpose.
I use git/Github in a simple way to keep the standard name table up to
date, but have no real experience of using branches. I'm not sure whether
using branches would make managing the document easier or more difficult
in the long run. Would we end up with a lot of overlapping changes that
require manual merging thus making the process of editing the document
more complicated that it need be?
I'm opposed to the suggestion that we move standard name discussions to
Github. There are a number of reasons for this:[[BR]]
1) Anyone can search for a public Github repository and see associated
issues. However, if one tries to open a new issue or comment on an
existing one Github asks the user to log in or create an account. It is
not uncommon for someone who is very new to CF to propose just one or two
new names. Asking them to create a Github account in order to do this is
overkill and will frighten some people away. Similarly, someone who wants
to contribute a single comment to a discussion (and this does happen on
the mailing list) should not be expected to create a Github account.[[BR]]
2) Many of the people who propose names are primarily scientists, not
developers. I know that Github is currently the version control tool of
choice for many software developers, but many scientists have never heard
of it. For example, I recently helped to teach a course to environmental
science PhD students in which git version control was one of the topics.
At the start of the week only five or six people out of a group of thirty-
seven had even heard of Github, let alone used it.[[BR]]
3) Often something that starts on the mailing list as a general discussion
along the lines of “how do I do X in CF?” then leads to proposals for a
few standard names. Recent mailing list discussions on “day of year” and
“tripolar grids” are examples of this. I don't think it's sensible to make
people switch from the mailing list to Github issues half way through a
discussion as that just spreads the information across multiple sources
making it harder to follow, not easier.[[BR]]
4) Discussing standard names as Github issues offers no practical
advantage compared to discussing them on the CF mailing list. My primary
tool for preparing updates to the standard name table is not in fact
git/Github but the CEDA vocabulary editor. This is software written in
Python, using Django to create web pages, and sitting on top of a database
containing the standard name proposals and the “standard phrases” that are
used to form the definition text. This software produces the standard
names status pages linked from the CF website on the Discussion and
Standard Names pages, e.g.
[http://cfeditor.ceda.ac.uk/proposals/1?status=active&namefilter=&proposerfilter=&descfilter=&filter+and+display=filter].
I use the editor to keep track of all proposals and report their status,
to generate the xml file that gets uploaded to the CF website and also to
generate files in a format suitable for uploading the standard names to
the NERC vocabulary server. When I generate a new version of the xml
standard name table I commit to my local git repository (containing a copy
of the CF website) and then push to Github, but this is only the final
step in a more complex process.
I remember having a conversation very similar to this one when we started
using trac and some people thought standard names ought to be proposed in
trac tickets. My arguments then were pretty much the same as above. Now we
are talking about dropping trac so I'm glad we kept standard names on the
mailing list and I think we should continue to do so.
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Ticket URL: <https://cf-trac.llnl.gov/trac/ticket/160#comment:20>
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