[Twisted-Python] git repo maintenance

Jasper St. Pierre jstpierre at mecheye.net
Sun Oct 21 22:55:41 MDT 2012


On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 12:05 AM, Glyph <glyph at twistedmatrix.com> wrote:
>
> 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.

As I said, the issue I had was not "svn diff" -- I had been working on
my fix, uploaded it to Trac, and it was a few months or so before
someone reviewed it. I forget who it was, but the reviewer prompted me
to make a few small style changes, flesh out a testcase, write a .news
file, that sort of thing. I updated my source tree to pull in new
changes from trunk, to make sure the patch that I had been working on
didn't rot. I was frustrated when I got merge conflicts for files that
I've never touched before.

> 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?"

I'd love to help out and do things, but unfortunately I don't have the
time these days. If you think that we should review code on the
Twisted GitHub repository, I'd gladly help out with that. I would help
out and review patches on Trac, but it's not as convenient: as far as
I'm aware: I can't set Trac up so that I get emails when a patch comes
in in a module I'm comfortable with, and I can't get an RSS feed of
all the important events in the project I'm aware of. If that exists
and I couldn't find it, I'll gladly review patches today.

> 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 another rhetorical anecdote, I tried using git-svn when I was
contributing to PyPy during the SVN days. It just didn't work out. I
don't know or can't say the same for bzr-svn or hg-svn or whatever
else cross-VCS systems there are, but I was left with a bad taste in
my mouth, so I figured it would be more worthwhile to stick with the
original source tool.

I may just be a drooling moron.

> 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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-- 
  Jasper




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