Hi, Despite the fact that I kept pushing a couple of other projects to switch to a different version control system (mostly from CVS to git), MacPorts is one of those projects where the current system (trac with nice linking between tickets and commits, subversion, buildbots, email accounts, ...) works pretty well and also looks nice. I do miss some functionality (like a website with a nice overview of packages with their build success, latest few commits etc.), but that isn't something that a migration can solve.
Subversion actually has a bunch of benefits over git in this particular environment. Git is strong in merging, cherry-picking, having a large number of branches etc., but I don't see much need for that for maintaining Portfiles. The biggest problem with Portfiles is that a number of people without commit rights might need to wait for a long time before someone picks up their patch and commits it, but switching to a different system would still mean that someone would need to look at commit and test it before accepting it. The only thing that could be different is probably a clearly visible pull request. In MacPorts' trac it's not too easy to spot the difference between "please commit this, it's fully functional" vs. "I've been just playing around and tossing ideas – feel free to look and this patch and improve it" vs. plain requests to fix things. And if a random developer just happens to have time and is willing to test and commit something, it's not clear in which of the thousands of open tickets to start looking. (Trac searches and browsing through tickets based on specific criteria could be improved, but I'm not sure how.) Migrating to a completely new system for version control and tickets would probably be either very difficult or lossy (or both). And the workflow would need to be redefined completely. I'm not saying that I oppose the idea if someone is actually willing to spend time to do it right, just saying that current system works nice and that git or hg probably wouldn't add that much. (For me, Tcl is the one that's often limiting my contributions a lot more than anything else because I don't have much experience writing code in it.) That said, a git/hg mirror on GitHub/ButBucket would definitely be nice. MacPorts could potentially offer a "selfupdate" from an arbitrary git/hg repository clone if necessary (but one can already have a clone on the filesystem and use that one). Btw, we now have: - Fink: CVS + Perl - MacPorts: SVN + Tcl - HomeBrew: GIT + Ruby We desperately need the fourth package manager using HG + Python ;) Mojca _______________________________________________ macports-dev mailing list macports-dev@lists.macosforge.org https://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-dev
