Re: Starting a module's history from gitpan
Guys, On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 3:03 AM, Salvador Fandino sfand...@yahoo.com wrote: Forking from gitpan is a fine plan! Yep, that's what I ended up doing. Finally got the official release out there, after tracking down some problems in the test files that CPAN Testers was thoughtful enough to catch for me. Thanx everyone for the good advice! -- Buddy
Re: Starting a module's history from gitpan
On 10/11/2011 11:11 PM, Buddy Burden wrote: Guys, So, I found a bug in a CPAN module that hadn't been updated in some time. After I submitted a bug in RT, I checked the author's other modules and his RT tickets: no activity in years. So I sent the author an email, and said, hey, if you don't want to mess with this module any more, I'd be happy to take it over for you. And, voila, I'm now the proud(?) maintainer of Data::Random. So I need to create a repo for the code, and it would be nice to start with the previous versions, right? Happily, there is gitpan, so I can pretty easily access all the CPAN versions of the code at least. Now, I've read Schwern's blog[1] on how to merge gitpan history into an existing repo, so I could essentially create a blank repo, do the merge as he describes, and go from there. But it seems to me that's unnecessarily complex, since I'm starting from scratch. What I'm wondering is, couldn't I just fork the gitpan repo for Data::Random[2] and have that become my repo? Obviously I would never plan on merging it back, but that shouldn't matter, I don't think. Does anyone see any downsides to this plan, or have a better suggestion? TIA! Forking from gitpan is a fine plan! I have even done it for several of my own modules when they needed some updating after years of being untouched and I was to lazy to go recovering them from my old archived subversion repository. Most modules are just not so complex to make having the full history available such a critical thing.
Re: Starting a module's history from gitpan
On Tuesday 11 October 2011 22:11:15 Buddy Burden wrote: Guys, So, I found a bug in a CPAN module that hadn't been updated in some time. After I submitted a bug in RT, I checked the author's other modules and his RT tickets: no activity in years. So I sent the author an email, and said, hey, if you don't want to mess with this module any more, I'd be happy to take it over for you. And, voila, I'm now the proud(?) maintainer of Data::Random. So I need to create a repo for the code, and it would be nice to start with the previous versions, right? Out of interest, did you try asking the original author whether he has a repo knocking around he'd be willing to share with you, so you can maintain history? If not, you could probably cherry-pick commits from gitpan to your new repo to get the previous releases there. I'm not entirely sure that would be worth the effort, though; there's only 4 prior releases, and the real value in having the history in version control is commit messages with explanations of decisions made and stuff, which you won't have if you just have the snapshots of releases from gitpan. Personally, I think I'd just import the current version into your new repo, with a commit message making it clear that this is the current state of the module and that you're taking over maintainership, then go from there. (and that previous versions are of course available from backpan or gitpan, for anyone who is interested) Cheers Dave P -- David Precious (bigpresh) http://www.preshweb.co.uk/ Programming is like sex. One mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life. (Michael Sinz)
Re: Starting a module's history from gitpan
* David Precious dav...@preshweb.co.uk [2011-10-12 11:15]: Out of interest, did you try asking the original author whether he has a repo knocking around he'd be willing to share with you, so you can maintain history? That would be ideal. I'm not entirely sure that would be worth the effort, though; there's only 4 prior releases, and the real value in having the history in version control is commit messages with explanations of decisions made and stuff, which you won't have if you just have the snapshots of releases from gitpan. It’s still useful to be able to get diffs. And with git, keeping that extra history around takes no space to speak of. I don’t really see the point of *not* doing it, considering how little effort it takes with the tools we have nowadays. Regards, -- Aristotle Pagaltzis // http://plasmasturm.org/
Re: Starting a module's history from gitpan
David, Out of interest, did you try asking the original author whether he has a repo knocking around he'd be willing to share with you, so you can maintain history? I must admit, I did not. Primarily because I was trying to keep my message very short and not ask for much. From my Googling around while searching for a valid email address, I could see that he no longer appeared to be programming (he is, in fact, the CEO of Formspring[1]), so I figured the briefer and more to-the-point my message, the better chance I had of not getting relegated to the spam bucket. Also, I figured that, since the latest version is from 2002, whatever repo he might have (if he still had it) would have to be converted to git anyway[2], so why not just use the gitpan version? Anyway, that was my thinking. -- Buddy [1] http://www.formspring.me/ [2] As, you know, git didn't exist yet back then.
Re: Starting a module's history from gitpan
* Buddy Burden barefootco...@gmail.com [2011-10-12 22:00]: I didn't know if somehow GitHub would consider my repo to be a fork forever-more If you use the fork button in the web interface, it will. If you really don’t want that, you can avoid it by cloning the GitPAN repo with git, creating your a new repo on Github, and then switching the `origin` URL of your clone to your own repo URL and pushing it. and that might somehow have negative side-effects. Nah. Regards, -- Aristotle Pagaltzis // http://plasmasturm.org/
