Re: svn management, git, etc
On Wed, Aug 09, 2006 at 11:50:55AM +0200, Christan Chiesa wrote:
> hello,
>
> OK, first of all i introduce myself as no one know me and i never did
> something for X :). I'm Christian, I'm not a Debian Developer but, for
> the moment, I'm the maintainer of some packages (all packages
> maintained by Riccardo Setti, he's busy at the moment) and I'm
> interested in X :)
Pleased to meet you.
> I use svn for pkg-galago and pkg-utopia project (all hosted on Alioth)
> and atm I'm really happy with it. I'm not a svn guru or something
> similar i just use it for my Debian work without have any kind of
> problem :)
> As David said you don't need to have all source code in the svn but
> only Debian/ for autobuild your packages (through svn-buildpackage). I
> don't know how git could be more useful for you (maybe i should say us
> ;) ) but whit a suitable structure i think we couldn't switch to git.
Does svn-buildpackage work with our current repo layout? When I looked at
the various svn addon tool for Debian, they required a specific repo layout
and I wasn't sure if it was compatible with ours. I haven't spent the time
to investigate it closely.
> My idea is to have 3 master-branches experimental unstable and stable
> which have only the Debian Dir of all packages. something like:
This setup is more or less like we already have, at least in my mind. It's
not laid out by debian distribution so much as by upstream version, but it
maps to the Debian distribution in my brain (which is probably why it's
hazy to everyone else). Removing the upstream source is do-able, but
potentially a bit of a pain, especially if svn-buildpackage and friends
don't work for us.
> - we could switch to Alioth which have more bandwidth and has a lot of
> cool feature .
Yes, but also serious complaints over how well it has been maintained. I'm
interested in using it for a git repo, but I don't think the features it
buys us for svn usage amount to much.
> I'm not a coder so i cannot provide (code) patch for X, what i can do
> is maintain the Debian packages: clean lintian errors, add copyright,
> change something if policy changes, triage bugs, talk with upstream.
>
> I need for it only a easy-to-use svn structure, nothing else.
No you don't. Using git to do simple things like this is fairly easy. See
http://wiki.freedesktop.org/wiki/UsingGit for info. This class of users I'm
not too worried about.
> If I'm a coder and a Debian maintainer i will need the same tools of
> the freedesktop guys plus a easy-to-use svn structure.
The freedesktop guys are all using git now, or will be soon. All the
upstream stuff for Xorg is in git. So in this case, you should know git and
not need the easy-to-use svn structure.
> - open a project on alioth. Import the 7.1 branches as experimental,
> trunk as unstable...for stable?
There's no need to move the svn repo to alioth. Branden has been responsive
enough about getting people accounts, and for my needs (and I guarantee you
that I have the most intense needs for this repo) the bandwidth is
sufficient, so that's a no-go right now. I'm interested in moving to alioth
at this point only if we're going to make a full switch to git.
> - Document what i made, and write a simple tutorial on how people
> should work on it. (Debian provides a lot of cool apps which will help
> our work)
The repo is actually fairly well documented for beginners by Branden.
People who get an account get the instructions. They need to be updated,
but they do exist.
The other thing you're completely ignoring is that git is vastly superior
for our needs in certain areas. Andres has complained about the various
branches. I have, sitting on my hard drive, three complete branches of the
Xorg source. The vendor branch (most all of 7.1), the Debian branches for
trunk (what's in unstable) and 7.1 (in experimental). Taking the size of
the X server tree from upstream, complete with 100% full history and every
single upstream branch in the main repo, the directory totals 61M. Just the
xserver from the Debian svn 7.1 branch is 119M. That's without any history.
And I have three of these on my hard drive just to do basic work. Forget
about feature branches too, this is just basic packaging stuff.
Furthermore, I have to do a lot of manual work to get upstream sources in
to our repo. Granted, with your plan this could be eliminated, but with git
I simply clone the upstream repo and I'm done. Then we have our own copy of
everything upstream has. Every single Debian contributor has a local copy
of not only the Debian changes but also upstream's. This is potentially
pretty huge in terms of convenience. If it helps me push patches upstream,
and also lets upstream know what we're doing, this is a big plus too.
Thank you for weighing in though. It's good to hear how other people are
using svn successfully.
- David Nusinow
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