[DRE-maint] Regarding your comment in my blog (re: Ruby Gems)

Gunnar Wolf gwolf at gwolf.org
Thu Dec 11 18:43:53 UTC 2008


Richard Hurt dijo [Tue, Dec 09, 2008 at 11:19:42AM -0500]:
> OK, I have to echo a few feelings on this as well.  Dr. Nic is right  
> in that we are using some old school tools and it is hard to onboard  
> new people.  Being a recent CVS convert I can't understand why we are  
> still on SVN and not Git.  Is this because the rest of the Debian  
> community has not moved to Git yet?  Also, it was *very* hard for me  
> to get up to speed on how this group operates and I still don't think  
> I'm quite there yet.
> 
>   - Is there any thought around moving to Git?

I am also a recent svn->git convert, however, I do see a fundamental
difference here: pkg-ruby-extras group works doing integration of many
different projects. Although our repository is not _that_ big, it is
very well suited to Subversion - much better than to git. They are
related to each other:

- It consists of many projects. Git does not implement partial
  checkouts - If I wanted to work on packaging libsomething-ruby, I
  can just check out
  svn+ssh://svn.debian.org/svn/pkg-ruby-extras/packages/libsomething-ruby.
  With git, I'd have to check out the whole repository.
- We build using svn-buildpackage, which works very well on this
  multi-package tree - As it builds on the SVN paradigm where any
  subtree can be independently checked out. Now, I have also become a
  fan of git-buildpackage... But it is a tool aimed to one package per
  repository. And makes sense - In SVN, each branch is a directory, so
  we can just move them to wherever we want in a larger tree. In Git,
  that would make no sense.

Now, of course, several courses of action could solve this... i.e. we
could create a skeleton outer tree just linking to each of the
subtrees via git submodules... But I do feel that to be overkill.

>   - Why are we still using mailman and not something more flexible?

More flexible? In what way?

This group has little interaction either over the lists or over IRC
(although they are quite important, precisely for idea interchanges
such as the one I want here ;-) )... What tool would you find better
suited than mailman?

>   - How can we make it easier to onboard people and projects?

Well... What have you found to be hard? ;-) Yes, I know that Debian's
ways are quite different to much of the ruby community, and I expect
both projects to remain quite different for a long time... And there
will always be a cultural divide. But I hope it won't be too big.

> BTW: I am still working on getting Redmine packaged up but it seems  
> like there is not much Ruby action happening on Debian lately (at  
> least there are no SVN commits).  One real reason I haven't been to  
> active lately is that I don't want to get in front of Lenny.  I figure  
> people are too busy trying to get a release out the door to bother  
> them with a new RoR package.  :/

Hey, please go on! It won't bother Lenny, as it is not touching
anything already inside. I'm a bit ashamed that I told you "go on"
before and then disappeared... But anyway, please bug me if you need
anything. We _do_ want Redmine!

-- 
Gunnar Wolf - gwolf at gwolf.org - (+52-55)5623-0154 / 1451-2244
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