[python-committers] [PSF-Members] Code Simplicity » Open Source Community, Simplified

[Barry Warsaw]

On Feb 04, 2011, at 12:35 PM, Victor Stinner wrote:

>I am already using a DVCS (git-svn) to work on Python, especially for my
>work on Unicode. It is just impossible to work on an huge change on
>trunk, it changes too fast. A SVN branch should be created or a DVCS
>tool should be used. I prefer DVCS over SVN: it's faster, it's easier to
>do small commits, merge/remove commits, etc.

I did all of my PEP work for 3.2 in a Bazaar mirror of the py3k svn branch.  I
made zillions of small commits as I was working things out, and it was very
easy for me to generate diffs for attaching to the bug tracker.  It was also
very easy for me to track changes in the trunk.  Of course, conflicts happen
occasionally, but that's unavoidable and IME were easily resolved.

For the actual commits to trunk though, I generated a patch and applied it to
the official svn branch.  I probably could have used the bzr-svn plugin to do
the commit directly, but for vague reasons I didn't.

>But my last problem is that I don't know how to publish my DVCS
>repository. It would be possible to host it at home, but I am to lazy to
>setup my server for that. The problem is also that the repository is
>huge (254 MB): publish it to Internet would be slow (I upload at 80
>KB/sec) if I have to publish all files (and the history) the first time.
>It would be faster if I can fork an existing repository on a server
>(download is always faster than upload).
>
>I suppose that bitbucket will have a miror of Python (because they
>already proposed to host the official repository), and so it will be
>trivial to fork Python repository with just a bitbucket account. That
>will be great, because it will easier to share a branch, without having
>to be a Python core developer.

We should most definitely host branches of works-in-progress for core
committers, just as we do for the official branches.  The fact that there are
free code hosting services available should make it easy for anybody to
publish their branches, anywhere they want.

>We might also host forks on our server, but it implies to have to
>manager user accounts (with permissions), so do the same job than
>Bitbucket and other hosting websites.

We already have to manage user accounts for core committers, so for them,
there should be little additional work.  In fact, two years ago, we did set up
personal code hosting on python.org servers for both the Mercurial and Bazaar
experiments.

It's definitely more work to manage user accounts for non-core committers, so
I'm not suggesting we do that from the start, but we should be open to that
option if we have the volunteers to maintain that.

-Barry
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