[Twisted-Python] git repo maintenance

[Glyph]

On Oct 21, 2012, at 11:57 AM, Duncan McGreggor <duncan.mcgreggor at gmail.com> wrote:

> I want to use git instead of svn so badly that I can taste it.
> Hopefully this provides the motivation necessary to maintain the repo
> :-)


For what it's worth, I haven't authored a branch for Twisted with SVN in the last 3 years.  I use Bazaar almost exclusively and I get all the fun tools one generally associates with a DVCS, including offline history and a nice graphical revision viewer.  (One reason I am concerned about migrating to Git is that this will stop working; in my opinions, Git's offline GUI tools are far worse than Bazaar's - almost as much worse as Launchpad's source browser is than Github.)

Similarly, I do code reviews by using a local 'bzr merge'.

The only weird workflow which isn't just built in to BZR-SVN is this:
<http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/wiki/BazaarMirror#CommittingaBazaarbranchtoaSubversionbranch>.  This involves rebasing, which makes me a little sad; I wish we could preserve more history, but it works fine.

I still land branches on trunk using SVN, but that takes about ten seconds assuming you use Combinator or svnmerge.py, so I don't see that being a big impediment.  You only need to worry about that if you have commit access anyway, so that's not most external contributors.  If the need to do that to land changes is preventing you from writing them in the first place, just let me know when you have a branch to land, and I'll do it for you.

You don't need to use SVN, you haven't needed to use SVN since git-svn came into existence, and we've had several threads on this list before about improving the Git instructions here: <http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/wiki/GitMirror>.  If you look at the history for that page, you can see that it is two years old, and originally created by exarkun, who is not a git user himself.

So, it strikes me as a bit odd, and I am a bit dismayed that anyone would have been put off of by the need to use Subversion when working with Twisted since you can use Git or Bazaar - or, I assume, Mercurial - right now.

I would find it a bit more understandable if you are dismayed by the need to use Trac, which is harder to avoid when working on Twisted.  For various reasons - which I hope we don't have to discuss right now - we aren't going to move the project to Github any time soon, so if anyone reading this thread is interested in alleviating some of the pain with Trac, <https://launchpad.net/frack> is a good place to get involved to help out.  There are some pretty straightforward bugs that anyone interested could fix there.

Frack is already up and running on twistedmatrix.com, albeit at a weird URL.  See, for example, <http://twistedmatrix.com/users/frack.twistd/ui/ticket.html?id=1956>. This might be useful because it is a considerably faster ticket-viewer than Trac, do to its somewhat more parsimonious issuance of SQL queries.

-glyph


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