Hello all,
*TL;DR*: Reminder to please bike-shed at
[[mw:Phabricator/Diffusion/Callsign_naming_conventions]]
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator/Diffusion/Callsign_naming_conventions>
before
December.
Just when you thought it was safe, there's the next stage in our migration
of developer tools over to Phabricator: moving all our code into the
Diffusion module <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator/Diffusion>.
This is *not* about doing code review in Phabricator; that task will be
left for another time. However, it does establish some immutable URLs and
so there's a lot of scope for discussion and verification about how exactly
we want to do things.
We currently use gitblit to provide our service at
git.wikimedia.org ; it's
a down-stream, read-only, HTTPS service for browsing all our git repos.
We'd like to replace this service with the single platform of Phabricator
because (a) we need to make these decisions anyway for the code review
workstream, (b) fewer tools makes for a simpler learning environment for
newbies, and (c) more integrated tools makes for fewer hacky bots and "work
arounds" for everyone.
To explore what Diffusion looks like, compare:
- GitBlit:
http://git.wikimedia.org/summary/VisualEditor%2FVisualEditor.git
- GitHub:
https://github.com/wikimedia/visualeditor
- Diffusion:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/diffusion/VE/
We need to agree how we are going to name our repos, and much more
importantly because it can't change, what their "callsign" is. These will
be at the heart of e-mails, IRC notifications and git logs for a long time,
so it's important to get this right rather than regret it after the fact.
A handful of repos are so important and high-profile that we can use an
acronym without too much worry, like "MW" for MediaWiki or "VE" for
VisualEditor. For the rest, we need to make sure we've got a good enough
name that won't cause inconveniences or confusion, and doesn't repeat the
mistakes we've identified over time. We've learnt since the SVN to git
migration a few years ago that calling your repository "/core" is a bad
plan, for instance.
*Action request*
The proposed naming conventions
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator/Diffusion/Callsign_naming_conventions>
and
in particular the plan for what we'll call the existing repos
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator/Diffusion/Callsign_naming_conventions/Existing_repositories>
when we duplicate them would benefit from more people looking at them, if
only to say that you don't care. :-) We've had these under discussion since
October so you may well have seen these before.
We plan to declare the current list as "agreed" in a week's time (that is,
by the end of 1 December) unless there's significant on-going discussion.
​Yours,
--
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, Editing
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
jforrester(a)wikimedia.org | @jdforrester