On Fri, May 30, 2014 at 7:50 PM, Daniel Friesen daniel@nadir-seen-fire.com wrote:
Eliminating localization updates from repos is always nice, I hate it when they fill up a repo's history. However using a submodule doesn't fix that it just replaces i18n file commits with a submodule update commit.
I guess we see different problems them. I don't care about the commits themselves, just the amount of data they contain :)
Submodule updates are always going to be lighter-weight.
Personally I've always wanted to switch to JSON messages (^_^ yay we already did that), drop messages for all language besides the canonical texts (en and qqq), then integrate the automatic fetching of messages for other languages into MediaWiki (tarballs releases can be bundled with a snapshot of the data for intranets, etc...; ExtensionDistributor can do the same; and thanks to things like localization caches we won't even need to require filesystem write to do this). Especially for extensions, the i18n commits for our extensions completely drown out the code contributions.
This would also be ok to me.
However I don't really like the thought of dropping the history. We're using git, switching to phabricator shouldn't actually break anything (except custom things like `git review`). git {clone|fetch|pull} won't work from the old url anymore, but all people have to do is `git remote set-url {new url}` or `git remote add {new remote} {new url}` and voila, they pick up right where they left off, this time with Phabricator backing git instead of Gerrit.
I know we can carry the history (and we should, for referencing), I'm wondering if we *should* keep the history on the repos that the average developer uses for writing patches and deploying.
(The deployment thing is just a nice benefit. I probably will do this in deployment regardless of what we do on the canonical repo)
I've yet to find a git repo out there that's as large as ours that doesn't ship large blobs around (which we don't). Some of this is due to the nasty blobs in our history. Some of this is due to the ever-increasing number of i18n commit blobs.
-Chad