[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Conference wish list: proper use of git

[Dan Scott]

This is probably unconventional, but hey, it's been at least an hour
since I've sent a message to an Evergreen mailing list and I'm jonesing
for a fix.

It seems clear to me that our community already could benefit from
adopting a DVCS - many of us are using *-svn to try to track one of the
SVN branches in bzr, git, and hg. And sites are doing custom development in
their own repos: Sitka has the mobile OPAC work, for example, and KCLS
has their custom skin, and I'm sure others exist. At Conifer, we've been
trying to use the ILS-Contrib SVN repository, but not many others seem
to use it. So maybe it's time to consider formally adopting a DVCS?

In which case, the very heavy gorilla these days is git. I've learned
enough git to pull from a branch in a github repository and push to a
branch in a gitorious repository and to do a bit of development in a
local branch... which is fine for as far as that goes.  I'm curious,
though, in learning how people deal for real with many, many branches
spread across a community; cherry-picking, merging, rebasing, etc,
without getting lost. http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0374/ provides
a nice summary of the workflows for SVN vs. Bazaar vs. Mercurial vs. git
(the Python developers chose Mercurial over git).

Let's assume that we would opt to go with the herd and adopt git in the
hopes of attracting more contributions to our core Evergreen and OpenSRF
distributions. I think it would make for a killer presentation to go
through our project's common workflows and show how git would improve
our lives (as well, of course, as how to perform said workflow in git,
with git's apparent love of flags for common operations). If we did want
to adopt git, then making the changeover as easy as possible so that
precious developer time is not wasted would be a good thing - and this
sort of presentation would be a big help. And I'm definitely _not_ the
person to give this presentation :)

To really be unconventional, I think it would be awesome to schedule a
session immediately following a git presentation strictly for discussion
and planning: when to make the change; who is going to do what; where
would the primary repo be hosted; how will we provide web-based access /
commit mailing list / etc; how will this interoperate with bug reporting
and tracking, who will update the "developer howto" docs that we
currently provide via the wiki on contributing to the project, yada yada.

So... any thoughts here? I think we would probably want an agreement in
principle that we want to move to a DVCS before asking someone to
propose a session and asking the Conference Committee to set aside two
consecutive slots, and maybe the end of December isn't the best time to
have that discussion, but I wanted to get these thoughts out while
they're relatively fresh.