On Thu, Dec 23, 2010 at 7:31 PM, Dan Scott <[email protected]> wrote:
> This is probably unconventional, but hey, it's been at least an hour > since I've sent a message to an Evergreen mailing list and I'm jonesing > for a fix. > > It seems clear to me that our community already could benefit from > adopting a DVCS - many of us are using *-svn to try to track one of the > SVN branches in bzr, git, and hg. And sites are doing custom development in > their own repos: Sitka has the mobile OPAC work, for example, and KCLS > has their custom skin, and I'm sure others exist. At Conifer, we've been > trying to use the ILS-Contrib SVN repository, but not many others seem > to use it. So maybe it's time to consider formally adopting a DVCS? > > In which case, the very heavy gorilla these days is git. I've learned > enough git to pull from a branch in a github repository and push to a > branch in a gitorious repository and to do a bit of development in a > local branch... which is fine for as far as that goes. I'm curious, > though, in learning how people deal for real with many, many branches > spread across a community; cherry-picking, merging, rebasing, etc, > without getting lost. http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0374/ provides > a nice summary of the workflows for SVN vs. Bazaar vs. Mercurial vs. git > (the Python developers chose Mercurial over git). > > Let's assume that we would opt to go with the herd and adopt git in the > hopes of attracting more contributions to our core Evergreen and OpenSRF > distributions. I think it would make for a killer presentation to go > through our project's common workflows and show how git would improve > our lives (as well, of course, as how to perform said workflow in git, > with git's apparent love of flags for common operations). If we did want > to adopt git, then making the changeover as easy as possible so that > precious developer time is not wasted would be a good thing - and this > sort of presentation would be a big help. And I'm definitely _not_ the > person to give this presentation :) > To really be unconventional, I think it would be awesome to schedule a > session immediately following a git presentation strictly for discussion > and planning: when to make the change; who is going to do what; where > would the primary repo be hosted; how will we provide web-based access / > commit mailing list / etc; how will this interoperate with bug reporting > and tracking, who will update the "developer howto" docs that we > currently provide via the wiki on contributing to the project, yada yada. > So... any thoughts here? I think we would probably want an agreement in > principle that we want to move to a DVCS before asking someone to > propose a session and asking the Conference Committee to set aside two > consecutive slots, and maybe the end of December isn't the best time to > have that discussion, but I wanted to get these thoughts out while > they're relatively fresh. > +1 all around. I'm also not the person to give such a presentation, but I have some experience working w/ Git clones of OpenSRF/Evergreen and would be happy to assist however I can. -b -- Bill Erickson | VP, Software Development & Integration | Equinox Software, Inc. / Your Library's Guide to Open Source | phone: 877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457) | email: [email protected] | web: http://esilibrary.com
