Your objections seem to be based on the assumption that you would need to have push access to all repositories, but I think that's the point of DCVS, you can just fork them, and then people can pull your changes in themselves (or using a tool). Pull requests could even be generated when things are out of sync.
I think it's quite possible this could make i18n/L10n work easier, not more difficult.
- Trevor
On Mar 22, 2011, at 7:25 AM, Siebrand Mazeland wrote:
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@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 08:27, Yuvi Panda yuvipanda@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Mar 20, 2011 at 9:25 PM, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason avarab@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.
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