On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 8:01 AM Asher Haig <as...@strong.ai> wrote: > > > On Dec 11, 2019, at 8:29 AM, Robert Vehse <robertve...@fastmail.fm> > wrote: > > > > Hi folks, and welcome, Asher. :-) > > Thanks! > >
> > I'm excited to see someone willing to work on Adium! > > Evan has done so much wonderful work, I’m happy to have the opportunity to > make some contributions to continue the App’s already rather amazing > longevity. > > A lot of people have made some fantastic contributions to the project, heck I was even emailing with Laura about things a month ago. I'm always glad to see someone interested in continuing the work so many others have before them. If you have any questions about decisions made I'm also happy to help try to answer them. > > > > I'd very much like to participate. Even in recent years with little to > zero development activity, I've thought about Adium a lot and I've been > working on a proposal on how to move forward once we have a release out > with the Catalina auto-scrolling fix. I'd be happy to talk about it here > soon. > > Great! It sounds like you’ve been doing a great deal on the non-code side, > which is very much appreciated. I’m hoping that as we get the code side > back in good shape we will be able to breath some life back into the app, > and all of the non-code details are incredibly important in that regard. > > > > I'd also like to offer guidance to Asher (or any other new contributor). > Even though I cannot read or write code, I think I am quite familiar with > many, many things relating to the Adium Project that are important to know, > for example what the different development branches contain and what state > they are in. > > I welcome any input or guidance. > > > Speaking of branches: Asher started development on Adium's Github > account. While it's great to see him being eager to get to work, I too > think it would have been good to get feedback for a move to Github here – > even with the lack of activity on this very list. It's just quite a > fundamental change. With its popularity Github lowers the barrier not just > for Asher but also other potential contributors which is obviously a good > thing. But I wonder whether are other questions to consider: Will it make > updating libpurple harder? What happens to commit history? > > > > Commit history has been 100% imported and all but I think 5 of the > previous contributors have been mapped to corresponding GitHub accounts. > The remaining few were difficult to isolate from other individuals with the > same name. > > Literally no one uses hg. I know of no projects other than Pidgin and its > kin. Someone correct me if I'm wrong here, but others do in fact use mercurial. However that's not relevant to adium in and of itself other than if you consider Adium a place for people to learn and build up skills before they go on to work on other, bigger things then using the "popular" version control system might be a good idea. I didn't see any discussion about switching repositories, I have two questions about using git and one about github: 1) I know in mercurial (and I believe the reason it was chosen for Adium) you cannot delete commit history, while at the same time with git you can do so with multiple options (rebase, filter-branches, git reset, etc.). For a public project to have the ability of one of its committers to be able to destroy commit history on a whim or by mistake seems like a risk nobody has discussed during this transition and was a big reason for choosing it if I recall correctly (it has been years though). Is this still the case? 2) Are there any other feature disparities between mercurial and git which have, or have not, been discussed on this list or in the irc channel? 3) Were any other hosting providers considered, such as bitbucket? Why was github chosen over the others if so? > Not only does everyone use git, but GitHub provides amazing tools and > networking on top of git’s features. In particular, the visual branch > comparison and merge tools are extremely convenient and allowed me to make > quick work of a number of old branches that had nothing in them. A few > branches remain with traces of ancient work that is probably irrelevant, > but which I have not pruned until we can fully determine that to be the > case. > > I don’t know of any reason that projects that Adium utilizes (such as > libpurple) would have any repository based relationship. If you see a > reason, please enlighten me. Not intended to be combative, I just haven’t > yet conceived of a reason. > At one point adium was pulling code directly from libpurple for the dependency. This I think was after the renaming of pidgin from gaim and libgaim to libpurple, but I could be wrong. Hope this helps. > > I haven’t touched the “Adium2" hg mirror that you set up, as I figured > that would require discussion before modifying. > > The simple fact is that I can visualize what’s going on much better in > git, and insofar as I’m the only one apparently working on code (and > working on a general overhaul of the code), that is extremely important. > The arguments that you provide regarding other people’s ability to > participate are also not minor. > https://www.sourcetreeapp.com/ makes viewing everything pretty easy in both if that helps. And a previous adium developer works on it (or did). > Asher -- Chris Forsythe
