On Monday, August 17, 2015 07:46:44 AM Martin Graesslin wrote: > Hi community, > > over the last months I observed the following: > * people not finding our git repositories > * people being surprised that our code is not on github > * some projects starting to use github in addition to our own infrastructure > > Whether we like it or not, github has become a place to look for free > software nowadays and if you are not on github your software just doesn't > exist. Given that we can say KDE doesn't produce source code because we are > not on github.
Hi, since this is finally going forward (yay!), I figured I would tell the story on how we handle things at WikiToLearn and why we have some problems with the new git.kde.org, to give the community some food for thought. We have a slightly different git usage compared to other KDE projects: a traditional application has the whole source code hosted in one git repository, where years of original work are developed and constantly integrated. In our case, our codebase is mostly consisting of small configuration files and a few tweaks, a few standalone extensions to already existing software of very diverse nature. When our patches are _not_ upstreamable (most of the times), we fork the original source code, and we later pull everything together for the deployment through submodules. Our extensions also need to be pluggable in any mediawiki, so for everyone of those, there is a new repository. This means that we have 16 git repositories for the moment, and we will get to 20 before the end of the month. Github working very well for us for a few reasons: the first one is automated docker build; which means that unless somebody decides to set up an own infrastructure for docker CI (and deploy?), which we have no resources to set up on our own, we have to use Docker's Hub which provides automated features for github. Secondly, sister projects that we forked, or in general Mediawiki extensions, are largely developed on github. Asking for help to a community who works in the same place where your sources are is a big strenght, as KDE certainly knows. The third, is that with the move to Phabricator we are going to have only flat git layouts. This means that every time any developer wants a new repo, they have to pass through an admin request. The ability to create a new repository with some dockerized software, and have it deployed on the staging server in a few tens of minutes is crucial to us, as it's very similar to what a developer do by running a make install. The current situation is that, for all these problems, WikiToLearn code is being hosted only on github (still even under the old name WikiFM) with a small a KDE scratch repo is now used as a mirror. We're working on fixing this with the sysadmins, but the solution doesn't seem obvious. Fortunately, WikiToLearn code development only accounts for 5-10% of the real development time (the real value is in the content, so this figure will also decrease as time goes by), so it's not a tragedy, but it's still something to keep in mind. Bye, -Riccardo _______________________________________________ kde-community mailing list [email protected] https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-community
