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  • From: Arwed von Merkatz <v.merkatz AT gmx.net>
  • To: sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Discuss] scm next steps
  • Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2006 00:31:36 +0200

On Wed, Apr 12, 2006 at 05:04:13PM -0500, Jeremy Blosser (emrys) wrote:
[...]
> The hard part right now is figuring out that trial of several SCMs at once.
> We will need volunteers and coordination. We may or may not need to be
> synching things back and forth to p4 during the trials, that's Arwed's
> call.

That could work either way, really depends on how the people
volunteering for the various scms want to do it. I think that to really
figure out how well something works, several people should work using
each of the systems, so having one place to synch back to p4 might be
less work overall compared to having to submit each change in both
systems.

> Also, to compare apples to apples, for these trials at least we will be
> moving away from the use of a dev/test/stable cycle to just having test as
> the persistent trunk/head branch, with individual spells branched to
> temporary dev branches as required. Arwed and others have wanted to move
> the Grimoire in that direction before, and it's really what the modern SCMs
> prefer.

The current devel -> test branching is mostly a historical fact that
hasn't been questioned too much. Overall it's just plain unnecessary and
even if we were sticking to p4 I would lobby for removing that step.
With stable-rc and stable grimoire both being versioned branches now,
there really is much less repeated merging between branches than there
used to be, making this process a lot easier on all scms.

> I will offer to get a central server on fawkes for each contender and
> support is as well as I can for the initial trials. Keep in mind these are
> trials, so while I'm glad to eg get whatever web frontend is available
> installed and set up, we may want to cut some corners initially just to
> save time. Whenever we pick something final we can polish it up more.
> Also note that various SCMs take more or less effort to get installed; this
> is the practical question of number of dependencies, so please just be
> patient if necessary. I'll delegate as much as I can to people that are
> familiar with a system and want to help support it, but I also need to keep
> familiarity with whatever is going on the box so I can continue to support
> the box as a whole.
>
> The current identified SCMs to try are git, svk, and svn. git is most
> similar to bzr (which the other teams are already using) and has a very
> robust feature set. svk is most similar to p4. svn is probably in the
> widest general community use. Is this the right list? Do we have some
> volunteer gurus/sections for each?

I think that's a good list, it covers most of the types of SCMs.
I guess for svn Pieter (e-type) or Mathieu (lejatorn) might be
interested :)

The evaluation should be done very objectively. Document all special
cases, weirdness or plain errors you run into, including (if available)
workarounds. Overall the data gathered during the evaluation could be
very useful for the future grimoire guru documentation, so keep that in
mind :)
What I'd also like to see is at least an overview of what external tools
are available for the SCMs, like branch history visualization, graphical
frontends, ... Our main concern is the raw usage of the SCMs since most
of us prefer working on the commandline, but there certainly are users
and use cases where graphical tools come in handy.

--
Arwed v. Merkatz Source Mage GNU/Linux developer
http://www.sourcemage.org




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