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

[Bill Erickson]

On Thu, Dec 23, 2010 at 7:31 PM, Dan Scott <dan at coffeecode.net> wrote:

> 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.
>


+1 all around.

I'm also not the person to give such a presentation, but I have some
experience working w/ Git clones of OpenSRF/Evergreen and would be happy to
assist however I can.

-b

-- 
Bill Erickson
| VP, Software Development & Integration
| Equinox Software, Inc. / Your Library's Guide to Open Source
| phone: 877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457)
| email: erickson at esilibrary.com
| web: http://esilibrary.com
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