Re: a poll for Dgit workflows
(I'm replying to Manoj and Marco, almost alternately, in one message.
Sorry if that's confusing...)
Manoj Srivastava writes ("Re: a poll for Dgit workflows"):
> On Wed, Mar 23 2016, Marco d'Itri wrote:
> > Having the alleged needs of naive users dictate the design of our tools
> > looks like a very bad choice to me...
Sorry, Marco, I was unclear. By "naive users" I meant people who
weren't familiar with the workflow practices of the maintainers of the
specific package. I don't mean people who don't know how to write
software, or don't know roughly what a Debian package is like, or
don't know how to use git.
But I think that someone who knows how to use git should be able to
get the source code for a package in Debian, as a git branch, and
modify that source code, and share it, and so on, without needing to
deal with quilt, or learn any of dpkg-source --commit, git-dpm, gbp,
git-debcherry, debian-git-patch-spoogler, Uncle Tom Cobbly and all.
> I think dgit should address the needs of all kinds of people,
> as it does not. Not all the people who disagree with you are mythic
> (though I quite like the appelation).
I too think that dgit should address the needs of all kinds of people.
(There are obviously some limitations to how a tool like dgit might
serve the needs of people who don't use git, but even having a
standard source code repo browsing tool would be a benefit for
non-git-users.)
> I appreciate the fact that dgit does indeed do things that are
> useful to me. Thanks, Ian.
You're welcome. I'm sorry it's not currently as widely useful as it
could be. Coping with all the different varieties of strange things
people do, and making something from them that doesn't depend on the
strangeness, turns out to be technically challenging. But not, I
think, impossible in the most common cases.
> > I am not sure of what benefits dgit would bring to me if I am not going
> > to use the repositories that it creates.
Marco: The users of dgit would benefit if you were to use it.
Of course making the lives of your users and collaborators easier, is
not a _direct_ benefit to you, but it may improve the quality of the
contributions you get. And, of course, we're not generally in this
for selfish reasons: I'm hoping you'll see the value in publishing a
dgit format version of your history, even if you don't use that
history yourself.
I appreciate that currently dgit can't work for you. I'm working on
making it able to take your existing git branches as input, and
publish them its the standard form. But for now you probably don't
want to be investigating dgit.
> I don’t think there is a contention that dgit is for everyone. I
> think it offers a useful publication medium; and if it allos other
> people to work with developers who do or do not prefer the repositories
> to reflect the tree the software is actually built from, then it is a
> net plus.
I want dgit to be for everyone who uses git.
Ian.
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