[Python-Dev] My patches

[Nick Coghlan]

Ulrich Eckhardt wrote:
> On Thursday 30 October 2008, Victor Stinner wrote:
>>> One of the reasons why I'm very keen on us moving to a distributed
>>> version control system is to help break the logjam on core developers.
>> Yeah, exactly :-) Does anyone already maintain a distributed tree?
>> Mercurial, GIT, anything else?
> 
> Bazaar. Take a look at the developers' pages on python.org, they mention that 
> a BZR checkout is available. I know that it works (though the initial 
> checkout is glacially slow) but I don't know what "official" support it has 
> or what is planned with it.

It's kept up to date, and will eventually move to a more complete DVCS
experiment (there are also mercurial and git mirrors being maintained,
but they haven't been linked from python.org yet - a trawl through the
python-dev archives should turn up the links to the URLs).

The PSF's infrastructure committee isn't that big though (and all
volunteers), and switching version control systems isn't exactly easy
(even the migration from Sourceforge CVS to python.org SVN took quite a
bit of effort from key people). The migration of all our regular
workflows from the familiar centralised VCS style to a DVCS style of
development promises to be pretty disruptive in the short term, no
matter how beneficial it will be in the long run.

That said, with the tracker migration from Sourceforge to Roundup behind
us, and a hopefully successful 3.0 release not too far away, it's
probably time to start giving the idea more serious thought.

Ultimately, any complete plan for migration from SVN to a DVCS will
likely need to come in the form of a meta-PEP like the one MvL wrote to
justify and document the migration from CVS to SVN:
http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0347/

Unlike PEP 347 (where SVN was purpose built as a "better CVS", thus
making the overall migration path and workflow updates reasonably
straightforward), a PEP for migrating to a DVCS would need to provide
justification not only for moving to a DVCS in general, but also for the
choice of a particular DVCS. Similar to the exercise in selecting
Roundup, part of that would not only be the features of the tool itself,
but also the available volunteer expertise to maintain an instance of it
on python.org.

One thing that such a PEP could probably also use is additional feedback
from folks outside the core dev team on how a DVCS would benefit them
(since the core devs are the ones least affected by the limitations of a
centralised VCS - although having something better than svnmerge to
handle maintenance of multiple branches would be a very good thing for
us too!).

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
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