On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 8:00 PM, Kevin Horn
<kevin.horn@gmail.com> wrote:
* Does Github's ticketing system have the kind of integration with Git
that Twisted has built for Trac+SVN? Bitbucket has some similar stuff,
so I would be surprised if Github didn't, but I just don't know.
Stuff like refs/closes interacts with the ticketing system yes. You can have as many hooks as you like for topfiles.
* Git is annoying. It's a pretty horrible piece of software in my
opinion, and made some bad design decisions.
magit makes it a lot more pleasant if you use emacs, by the way.
* Git essentially makes Windows a second-class environment (as did
Combinator). We already have trouble recruiting Windows people, and
IMO one of Twisted's strengths is that you can usually run things on
Linux/MacOSX/Windows with very few cahnges, if any.
I've been told this has *vastly* improved, but I don't know for sure since I'm not a Windows user.
* For me, Bitbucket has always been pretty comparable to Github. I know
others will disagree, and point out all kinds of features that Github
has over Bitbucket, but apparently I never use those features. Perhaps
those features (whatever they are) are more important in projects
of Twisted's size and/or history.
Yes, many features are comparable, the main feature differences are polish, but the killer difference is community size.
* I have been told, but not actually experienced, that using the hg-git
plugin for Mercurial makes using Git for your repository into "an
implementation detail", and the user basicaly doesn't even really
have to care that they aren't using Hg. If true, this would make me
pretty happy...but I'm not entirely sure that it _is_ true.
Although I've never tried this, I've been assured this is the case.
* it is unclear how Github would work with UQDS with regards to having a
ticket for all new work. IMO this is even more important than code
reviews. Would we just say: no pull requests will be accepted unless
Your question got cut off. I think you wanted to say "there's a ticket for that"?
* How would running buildbot over a git/bzr/hg branch work? Would Github's
hooks be able to drive this? Would we be able to tell buildbot to "go
run tests on this branch"?
Although I've never tried this, I've been assured this is the case.
* Assuming a change like this would take place, what would the plan be
for transition? Would all the branches that are out there be
migrate-able? What about all the Trac tickets, wiki, etc?
The first thing I thought right after I thought "we're going to need a trac to markdown converter" is "khorn is going to jump off a cliff next" ;-)
* How does this affect the Sphinx transition plan? (I don't really know
that it would affect it at all...).
I don't see how it would.
* Since Twisted's current web presence _is_ a Trac site, who's going to
step up and build a new website? Github/Bitbucket/Launchpad is _NOT_
a replacement for an actual "marketing" or "home page" type site.
Absolutely not. I am *not* advocating replacing this site, simply having something similar that isn't trac and isn't involved in the site development. If anything, this separates the concerns of "home page style site" and development site even clearer, IMO.
Overall, this is probably a good plan, but it's going to bea harder and take
more work than people think.
Also, I agree with Itamar's comments that while switching to a DVCS might
ameliorate Twisted's social/organizational issues somewhat, but is unlikely
to wholly fix them. That stuff needs to be discussed and worked on as well.
There's no silver bullet. Not making new potential contributors bend over, and having all contributions trivially easy to put in version control, regardless of their contributor status, sounds like a good start.