From what I understand, common thought is that phase3
and all individual
extensions, as well as directories in trunk/ aside from
extensions and
phase3 will be their own repos. Possibly there will be meta collections
that allow cloning things in one go, but that does not allow committing to
multiple repos in one go without requiring scripting. This is a use case
that is used *a lot* by L10n committers and others. I think this is bad.
I am raising my objections against GIT as a replacement VCS for
MediaWiki's
svn.wikimedia.org and the way people are talking about
implementing it again from an i18n perspective, and also from a
community/product stability perspective.
I raised this in the thread "Migrating to GIT (extensions)"[1,2] mid
February. My concerns have not been taken away. i18n/L10n maintenance will
be a lot harder and more distributed. In my opinion the MediaWiki
development community is not harmed by the continued use of Subversion. In
fact, the global maintenance - I define this as fixing backward
incompatibilities introduced in core in the 400+ extensions in Subversion,
as well as updating extensions to current coding standard - that many
active developers are involved in now, will likely decrease IMO, because
having to commit to multiple repos will make it more cumbersome to perform
these activities. Things that require extra work by a developer without
any obvious benefits out are just discontinued in my experience. As a
consequence, the number of unmaintained and crappy extensions will
increase, which is bad for the product image and in the end for the
community - not caring about that single extension repo is too easy, and
many [devs] not caring about hundreds [of extensions] is even worse.
Please convince me that things will not be as hard as I describe above, or
will most definitely not turn out as I fear. I am open to improvements,
but moving to GIT without addressing these concerns for the sake of having
this great DVCS is not justified IMO.
Siebrand
M: +31 6 50 69 1239
Skype: siebrand
[1]
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2011-February/thread.html#5
1812
[2]
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2011-February/051817.html
On 22-03-11 10:15 Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 08:27, Yuvi Panda
<yuvipanda(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, Mar 20, 2011 at 9:25 PM, Ævar Arnfjörð
Bjarmason
<avarab(a)gmail.com> wrote:
But actually the reason I did this mirror was as
a proof of concept
for a (still incomplete) conversion to Git.
Is there still interest in that? I don't have a lot of time for it,
but I could help with that if people want to go that way.
If lack of people dedicated to this is why a migration isn't being
considered (I guess not), I volunteer myself.
Lack of time and people is indeed a factor. The import we have now
isn't a proper Git conversion.
I still have some vague notes here detailing approximately what we
need, some of these are out of date. The "Split up and convert"
section is somewhat accurate though:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Git_conversion
No SVN to Git tool does exactly what we need due to our messy
history. I came to the conclusion that it was probably easiest to
filter the SVN dump (to e.g. fix up branch paths) before feeding the
history to one of these tools.
Of course even if we come up with a perfect conversion it's pretty
much useless if Wikimedia doesn't want to use it for its main
repositories. So getting a yes/no on whether this is wanted by WM
before you proceed with something would prevent you/others from
wasting their time on this.