When Isaac comes back online I'll revert the configuration of Trac so that it 
uses SVN until we are happy with how the Git repo looks.  Until we are happy 
with how things run while using Git we will continue to use SVN for project 
development.

I wouldn't call this a rush job at all. Work began on this in March, the 
initial conversion of the repo took a month to run through.  It looks like 
there are a few more issues to work on.  Right now this is still a work in 
progress.  The BOINC Git repo on disk at present is around 300MB. We shall see 
how large it remains after zlib, openssl, curl, and wxWidgets are removed from 
the repo.
 
I had envisioned the workflow after Git migration to be the same.  Those that 
have SVN commit access now would have Git push access.  Things would be changed 
or tweaked from the current policy as needed.

----- Rom

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] 
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Nicolás Alvarez
Sent: Thursday, May 31, 2012 2:14 AM
To: BOINC Developers Mailing List
Subject: Re: [boinc_dev] Moved to git?

2012/5/30 Travis Desell <[email protected]>:
> Distributed version control in git is pretty awesome (something AFAIK SVN 
> doesn't do).  Everyone get's their own local repository to play with and only 
> needs to push changes to the main repository when they've finished.  This 
> lets you commit and rollback locally without effecting what everyone else is 
> using.  In general that should lead to a more stable trunk for everyone else 
> to use.
>
> --Travis

Indeed, Git is awesome. What's not awesome is switching to it in a rush, doing 
the most half-assed SVN-to-Git conversion I have seen (I'm the main contributor 
to KDE's migration to git), and having absolutely no discussion with the 
community *before* migrating.

Once the switchover is done, you don't really get to do the repository 
conversion again. It has to be perfect the first time. Having SVN UUIDs as 
email addresses, and keeping the Windows dependency libraries (they aren't in 
the latest code but remain in history, and I'm sure will make the repo grow to 
1GB), makes it way far from perfect. And that's just from what I can see in 
gitweb, since the clone URL doesn't work at the moment.

Then there is the workflow to consider. Who has push access? Who has 
branch-creation access? Do the people with commit access already know how to 
use git properly? How do third-parties contribute code? Email patches, clone 
the repo in a site like github and give a link to it, get push access to a 
branch/clone in BOINC's infrastructure, put a git bundle in a pendrive and mail 
it to the UCB? How are multiple branches
managed: commit bugfixes to the stable branch and merge to master, or commit to 
master and cherry-pick to the stable branch? Will there be feature branches? If 
so, will they be rebased or merged into master?


It's not the first time external developers are left in the dark about big 
changes like this. I don't even need to dig too much for an example, the 
CVS-to-SVN move was done in the same way: "we're now in SVN, this is the new 
URL".

If you don't start getting the community involved in changes like this, BOINC 
will continue forever as 3 paid developers with very very few external 
contributions and feedback. Just look at 
http://www.ohloh.net/p/boinc/contributors and the edit history of the 
DevProcess wiki page, it clearly shows that 1. situation is worsening (people 
are leaving rather than joining), 2. situation has never been good enough.

--
Nicolás
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