On 2012-07-08 14:44, Joerg Jaspert wrote:
You work on reports, you can easily look into earlier ones, without needing the whole rest of the older gits. When one argument of the switch and split is to minimize size, then it applies here too :)
While I'm not against changing VCS technologies, or against reducing the size of each repository, this point about looking at older material goes for all categories of DebConf work. I realise that some material has gone into SVN that should never have been there, but it would be really bad if we stopped future team members from benefiting from our institutional memory by having the ability to look at previous years' files for topics they're working on.
As a practical example, visa letters for specific people, with ID numbers etc., should not be in the VCS, but we do want people working on visa/invitation letter issues to be able to see and re-use the template letters from previous years -- but we don't really want these to be too public on the web, so that scammers start using our letters too easily (most years we have a few people looking for letters from us for apparently fraudulent purposes).
Equally, most local team topics benefit from looking at material put in the VCS by previous years -- in most cases this is not really secret information from our point of view, but may be put into the more restricted -team repository because venues prefer information on prices etc. to be confidential, or because it contains information from our viewpoint about ongoing negotiations, which shouldn't be public at least until DebConf is over. Some of this information could in principle be checked and shifted between repositories once DebConf is over, but I really doubt whether we will have enough volunteers willing to do that work, with no immediately apparently benefit (the benefit only coming gradually over subsequent years, to other people).
-- Moray