[Mulgara-dev] Admin updates at Mulgara and Topaz

Life is hard, and then you die ronald at innovation.ch
Wed Mar 4 14:38:42 UTC 2009


On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 03:20:21PM -0600, Paul Gearon wrote:
[snip]
> Most things will move transparently, but I know that the sysadmin at
> Fedora (Chris) would like to keep their systems as homogeneous as
> possible, so not everything will be seamless. I'll insist on keeping
> our history (ideally as an import into the new systems), but this
> might also be an opportunity to change what we are using. I'll go
> through each one here:
> 
> Web Site: The website is just static html pages. It won't matter where
> it's hosted, so long as we can get to it via http://mulgara.org/
> 
> Source code control: Subversion was certainly a step up from CVS, but
> the world seems to be moving toward distributed version control. I've
> heard really good reports about GIT, and since it's come from the
> Linux kernel community, I'm inclined to give this a try.

I've been using git pretty much exclusively for the last 9 months or
so (yes, even for mulgara and topaz) and really like it quite a bit. A
few things to note, however. First, it takes some getting used to, as
a number of things are different (and I'm not talking about the
distributed nature here, but everyday operations such as updating and
committing). While most things make sense once you gain a deeper
understanding of git, many things will seem downright odd and
confusing until you do. So much so, in fact, that I would not
recommend it to any junior (and even some mid-level) developers or to
anybody who isn't willing to spend the time to familiarize themselves
thoroughly with it. Having said that, if you do take the time to get
used to it, the rewards are great: it has significantly changed the
way I deal with commits, branches, and general day-to-day operations,
and I would not want to go back. I.e. it's definitely a "power tool".

The second thing is related to the distributed nature of git and
central repositories. Maybe I'm a bit old-fashioned, but I think for
most projects you still want some sort of central or "main" repository
from which the releases are done, where people can check out the
"head", from which ci builds are run, etc. Git's subversion support is
reasonably good, so it's perfectly viable to keep running subversion
and just switch to using git personally (as I have done).
Alternatively, you can set up public git repository as a central
repository for folks.

Lastly, git support is not as widely available in the tools yet
(though it seems to be improving quickly). There seem to be a number
of folks here who prefer IDE's to cli, hence something to keep in
mind.

> Mailing lists: Chris can port these over to a Fedora Commons server.
> However, I'd like to try pushing this out to Google Groups. This would
> let us try a few new things with the email to mulgara.org that is
> currently awkward to do (like using the Google Apps service for
> Mulgara). Of course, we'll keep existing archives publicly available.

Yes, make sure the history is not lost on these.

> Wiki: Chris tells me that they *can* bring over Trac, but that
> everything else at Fedora Commons is running on Confluence/Jira. (This
> is frustrating, as I spent long nights getting our old data out of
> Confluence/Jira and into Trac in the first place). The porting of data
> can be completely automated, and it makes much more sense for Fedora
> Commons to only manage the one system, so I'm inclined to say OK to
> the change.

That is really up to you. Personally I find Confluence/Jira irksome
and the lack of integration with the repository and the lack of the
timeline major drawbacks. But you have to deal with it the most.


  Cheers,

  Ronald




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