DVCS talks at GUADEC
Yesterday, a BoF was scheduled for discussion of distributed version control systems with GNOME. The BoF session did not end up really discussing the issues of what GNOME needs out of a revision control system, and some of the examples Federico used were a bit snarky.
We had a more productive meeting in the session afterwards where we went over some of the concrete goals for the system. The list from the blackboard was:
- Contributor collaboration (i.e. let anyone use the tool rather than just core developers).
- Distro ⇔ distro and distro ⇔ upstream collaboration.
- Host GNOME source code repositories
- Code review
- Server side hooks
- Translators: what to do?
- Enforced checks
- Offline operations
- Documentation authors?
- Support Win32/Mac (important for GTK)
The sys admin tasks were broken down to:
- MAINTAINERS file syntax checking
- PO file syntax checking
- CIA integration.
- Commits mailing list
- Check that commit messages are not empty
- Trigger updates from commits (e.g. the web site module).
- Release notes tarballs
- Damned Lies support
It was clear from the discussion that neither Git or Bazaar satisfied all of the criteria.
The Playground
John Carr did a great job setting up Bazaar mirrors of all the GNOME modules. This provided an easy way for people to see play around with Bazaar. However, it only gave you half the experience since it didn’t provide a way to publish code and collaborate.
To aid in this, we have set up the bzr-playground.gnome.org machine, which any GNOME developer should be able to use to publish branches based on John’s imports. Instructions on getting set up can be found on the wiki. I hope that we will get a lot of people trying out this infrastructure.
We gave a presentation today on some of the things Bazaar provides that could be useful when hacking on GNOME. Demoing bzr-playground was a bit problematic due to the internet connection problems at the venue, but I think we still showed some useful tools for local collaboration, searching and code review.
Meanwhile, Robert Collins has been working on some of the GNOME sysadmin features that Bazaar was lacking. Among other things, he got Damned Lies working with both Subversion and Bazaar, with a test installation on the playground machine.