Re: Tell me about your salsa experience
Dmitry Bogatov <KAction@debian.org> 于2019年4月22日周一 下午5:56写道：
>
>
> [ I know, it month and half late ]
> [ I did my best to recover thread. Sorry, If I failed. ]
>
> [ Please, CC me if you want me to reply. I'm not subscribed to debian-devel@ ]
>
> [ Alexander Wirt ]
> > Thats where you come in, please tell me how tools like salsa, alioth,
> > git, tracker and so on changed to way you work. I want to know
> > everything, the good, the bad and so on.
>
> Glad you asked. So I have excuse for stating my opinion, which is quite
> unpopular.
>
> Summary: Introduction of salsa is nothing short of disaster.
>
One problem of salsa is that the speed of fork is quite slow.
I guess we need something like CoW.
> I started working with Debian in mid-2014, when all code lived on
> alioth. The best thing about alioth is that I did not interact with it.
>
> Alioth did not get in my way. I had ssh access to alioth.debian.org, all
> operations was simple and intuitive. I had choice of VCS to use, git
> hooks were easy to setup, every chore was easy to script. I participated
> in two teams -- Haskell and Emacs. Everything was smooth, it is just
> matter of file permissions.
>
> Maybe developers, who granted me access to teams, had to deal with
> something more terrible I can imagine. Maybe administering Alioth for
> DSA team was nightmare. No idea, I am telling about my experience.
>
> And then came yet another tragic day for Debian, and Gitlab replaced
> alioth.debian.org. It brought pain, inconvenience and friction.
>
> Performing basic operations with repository now either impossible
> (salsa forces foo/bar naming, instead of flexibility of proper
> filesystem on Alioth), or requires learning new useless stuff.
>
> There is no longer proper git hooks.
>
> Other version control systems are gone.
>
> In an instant, I became second-class citizen, now everything --
> documentation, processes, defaults -- everything is optimized for
> running "modern" browser and pushing buttons. Scriptability is pain.
>
> That is not all, folks. Salsa brought own issue tracker and concept of
> pull-request. So now I can't just mail a patch with reportbug(1) --
> there are chances, that maintainer will either ignore it, because he
> only follows salsa issue tracker, or that he will ask you to make a
> pull-request on salsa.
>
> git was step forward from svn/cvs -- now we can work on our version
> control system offline. Salsa issue tracker is a same step backward from
> debbugs -- it disables offline working with bugs.
>
> To be fair, there is very minor positive thing in salsa -- Gitlab CI.
> Its usefulness is limited, since there is no API to capture output in
> real time, so I still have to use sbuild on my local machine, but
> ability to rebuild package once in a week and get email on failure is
> good thing to prevent package rot.
>
> I know, Alioth was unmaintained, but just having box with sudo rules
> about adduser/usermod and Apache, running cgit would be much better
> replacement. Well, this ship sailed; I have been writing scripts to deal
> with madness around for a while, and it seems I will have to continue to
> do so.
> --
> Note, that I send and fetch email in batch, once every 24 hours.
> If matter is urgent, try https://t.me/kaction
> --
--
YunQiang Su
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