[Twisted-Python] git repo maintenance

Glyph glyph at twistedmatrix.com
Mon Oct 22 00:05:07 EDT 2012


On Oct 21, 2012, at 11:54 AM, Jasper St. Pierre <jstpierre at mecheye.net> wrote:

> On Sun, Oct 21, 2012 at 2:48 PM,  <exarkun at twistedmatrix.com> wrote:
>> On 06:37 pm, jstpierre at mecheye.net wrote:
>>> On Sun, Oct 21, 2012 at 2:30 PM,  <exarkun at twistedmatrix.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> *snip*
>>>> While I'm sympathetic to toolchain woes, I can't help but wonder if
>>>> you're being really honest here (with yourself, at least).  Running
>>>> "svn
>>>> diff" may make you feel bad inside, because svn isn't the latest cool
>>>> toy, but a *hurdle*?  It's just difficult to understand.
>>> 
>>> Yes. it's difficult to understand. I see that as a hurdle.
>> 
>> I would hope that we could keep the level of discourse above this.
> 
> I'm not sure exactly what you want to hear.

In case it was actually not clear and you're not just being sarcastic, exarkun was saying that it's difficult to understand that someone with the required expertise to contribute to Twisted in the first place would have trouble with running the command 'svn diff'.  'svn diff' itself is not at all difficult to understand.

Since Subversion is effectively the baseline fisher-price "my first version control system", I would assume that anyone who could effectively use Git (which has all the user-interface convenience of an unshielded circular saw) would have no trouble with it, especially with the very basic usage that contributing to Twisted requires.

Since you asked, there are two things that I'd like to hear:

"Hooray!  I will help oubiwann maintain the git(hub) mirror!  what would you like me to do?"
specific problems that you've had with SVN that we might be able to address in the future or help you with, and not vague bellyaching about how we're not using the thing you happen to like best.

If you're going to say the first thing and commit to helping though, please be sure first that you actually have the time and energy to follow through.  At this point, the number of people who have appeared, volunteered to maintain a git mirror, done it for five minutes and then disappeared forever, leaving it in a broken, unmaintained state, is in the double digits.  (I am starting to wonder if Git gives it users some kind of brain damage that makes a person incapable of meeting commitments.)

> The few times I've tried to contributed to Twisted, svn was actually a big barrier. Trying to update my patches so that I'm sure the tests pass on trunk produced mysterious merge conflicts in files I've never touched. Maybe I'm bad at svn, but it's never worked well for me.

Why aren't you just using git for local development then?  You don't have commit access, so you should never need to touch an svn client other than git if you don't feel like it.

This is not entirely a rhetorical question.  We have always tried to be accommodating to DVCS users, providing instructions and repeated requests for both a plain git and/or a github ambassador to keep svn nicely synchronized and reduce the friction required for users of those tools to make contributions.  If the documentation we've offered on <http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/wiki/GitMirror> is in any way incorrect or non-optimal, please don't hesitate to say exactly what would be better.  If you need wiki edit permission to update the page, I'll gladly give it to you.

-glyph

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