Responding to both Maarten and Yuri because of a large overlap in their opinions ;-)
On 26 December 2012 16:45, Maarten Dammers maarten@mdammers.nl wrote:
As a consequence, the WMF also wants to stop running their svn server - which is the server we are using.
No planned date yet so we don't have to rush anything.
Sumana (cc'ed) mentioned to me that SVN will switch to read-only in March. I don't think it's a really 'hard' deadline, but I also think the WMF would not be amused if we had no plans and some schedule at that point :-)
On 26 December 2012 16:45, Maarten Dammers maarten@mdammers.nl wrote:
-1, I would like to keep everything together in one central place, don't scatter it all over the internet. Kill Sourceforge and have everything like Mediawiki. It's not that I like Gerrit and Bugzilla that much, but I hate to be on yet another website.
On 26 December 2012 18:24, Yuri Astrakhan yuriastrakhan@gmail.com wrote:
SVN - I think we should be moving away from it. If we switch to a host that has specialized GIT+SVN support, it will be hard to move away to another provider that doesn't have elaborate SVN features.
Agree with Martin re moving closer to API & MW in general. Hosting on MW gives us a very different status than 30+ MW API libraries on the web. We should be using our expertise in building the core product, and reduce user's confusion of which one to pick (all else being equal).
I'd like to note that, with git, it's not an or-or situation, but rather an and-and situation. After all, the WMF is also working on integrating github-style pull requests with gerrit, which means you get the best of both worlds: hosted at the WMF, with all the infrastructure (including testing et al), but also with the ease and documentation of github. On the other hand, if we host it at github, it's easy enough to sync the repository to gerrit, too.
The question is which will be our main repository, (and thus the other one will be the mirror) - not which one of the two will exist :-)
In any case, I'd like to have SVN compatibility for our /users/ - SVN is also used as a crude auto-updating mechanism. I think it's possible (at least, I've tried some things and it seems to work) to use svn:externals to link a new repository from the old one (stupidly, SVN doesn't just do http redirects). However, I think we should move to a slightly more intelligent auto-update mechanism.
On 26 December 2012 16:45, Maarten Dammers maarten@mdammers.nl wrote:
One of the things to consider too is the automatic testing. We could slowly start deploying that so every commit gets checked and maybe in the future we're able to detect stuff like https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=43177 .
If we want to do post-merge tests, it doesn't matter where the repository is located. However, for pre-commit tests, I agree it's much easier to use Gerrit, as it already has Jenkins (= automated test runner) integration.
On 26 December 2012 18:24, Yuri Astrakhan yuriastrakhan@gmail.com wrote:
Also I wonder if we will be able to use MW hosting without Gerrit - by allowing direct master commits.
Yes, this is possible, but then we have none of the positive sites of hosting it at the WMF: no testing integration and no pre-commit review.
So - yes, there are certainly advantages in moving to gerrit. But, compared to github, the documentation is much less clear. However, maybe the right response is 'fix the docs' instead of using github :-)
Merlijn