[Numpy-discussion] curious about how people would feel about moving to github

[Anne Archibald]

On 27 May 2010 04:43, Charles R Harris <charlesr.harris at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Maybe most importantly, distributed revision control places any
>> possible contributor on equal footing with those with commit access;
>> this is one important step in making contributors feel valued.
>>
>
> Well, not quite. They can't commit to the main repository. I think the main
> thing is to be responsive: fast review, quick commit. And quick to offer
> commit rights to anyone who sends in more that a couple of decent patches.
> Maybe we should take a vow to review one patch a week.

Okay. Suppose we wanted to replicate the current permissions
arrangement as closely as possible with git. It seems to me it would
look something like this:

* Set up a git repository somewhere on scipy.org.
* Give everyone who currently has permission to commit to SVN
permission to write to this repository.
* git submissions would become possible: a user would make some
changes but instead of posting a patch would link to a particular git
state. The changes could be reviewed and incorporated like a patch,
but with easier merging and better history. If the changes became out
of date the user could easily merge from the central repository and
resolve the conflict themselves.
* Patch submissions would be reviewed as now and committed to git by
one of the people who do this now. Alternatively they could be
integrated to the mainline by someone without write access and
published as a git change, to be incorporated (easily) as above by
someone with write access.
* if review and inclusion were slow it would nevertheless be easy for
users to pull from each other and build on each other's changes
without making the eventual merge a nightmare.

So, no major change to who controls what. The nipy/ipython model takes
this a step further, reasoning that git makes branching and merging so
easy there's no need for such a large group of people with write
access to the central repository, but if that doesn't work for
numpy/scipy we don't need to do it. And we can change in either
direction at any time with no major changes to infrastructure or
workflow.

To get back to the original point of the thread: nobody has yet
objected to git, and all we have are some debates about the ultimate
workflow that don't make much difference to whether or how git should
be adopted. Is this a fair description?


Anne