On Fri, Feb 05, 2016 at 12:19:27PM -0800, Krzysztof Kosiński wrote:
2016-02-05 5:00 GMT-08:00 Martin Owens <doctormo@...400...>:
There's a lot of support for Git, but I do have reservations about Github. It's a lot more like a cult than a platform and it's very much a monopoly at this point and I remember Bitkeeper. At least the repository is movable and they have an api for exporting issues and a wiki.
I have no opinion on the bug tracker / issue tracker problem yet. It would be a fairly strong argument for staying on Launchpad, since moving that over is a lot more complex. Can you attach arbitrary files to Github comments directly, or do you need to use some external site and post links?
I've used the bug tracker on github pretty intently for one smallish project. For that it was quite serviceable. gitlab and other git hosters seem to be on par with github's capabilities.
For Inkscape I'd worry it'd be a mis-fit culturally, as we've come to rely pretty deeply on Launchpad-specific functionality that doesn't have an easy analog in github. Also I'm not sure how we'd physically move the bugs, given what a volume we have.
I'd love to see us upgrade our bug tracking capabilities, but I don't think what any of the current git hosts provide is going to be suitable.
I suppose that begs the question that if we don't move the bug tracker off Launchpad, then should we give a stronger weighting to Launchpad's git service? Launchpad has a little integration between bzr and the bug tracker, but last I checked that integration hadn't been done for git? If it isn't, then there's probably not a whole lot to make us prefer LP git over other options. If it is, well then the question would be whether that integration's benefit is significant versus benefits we'd gain from switching.
It's would enforce using a more code-review style model, no matter how many people we make a part of an Inkscape organisation.
The main reason we rarely do that on Launchpad is that Launchpad makes it rather tedious (e.g. no single-click merge from the Web UI). Code reviews are very valuable, and in our situation where we have lots of accumulated technical debt, making them easier to use would be a win.
The one click merges are indeed quite nifty, and definitely make merging very, very easy.
HOWEVER, these merges don't rebase the branches, and as a result some consider the results of the merges to be kind of trashy. If you're trying to stick with "proper" git history, you wouldn't use this feature. I don't know whether it's acceptable for Inkscape or not (since we accept the bzr merge philosophy maybe we wouldn't consider these merges quite so "trashy"), but I admit on projects where I have used it, I've regretted lazily using the button merges more than a couple times...
So yes, it's a cool and handy feature but be forewarned it may not prove to be quite the panacea it seems to promise.
Bryce