Re: Proposal for more reliable git mirroring

[Roy Marples <roy%marples.name@localhost>]

Hi Jeff

On 03/01/2014 21:57, Jeff Rizzo wrote:
> I've had enough other pleasant (very!) dealings with you that I'm
> giving you the benefit of the doubt, here, but please be aware that
> your tone here is coming across as fairly hostile and abrasive - and I
> don't think anything I've said or done has warranted that.

One of my character flaws I'm afraid when something just rubs me the 
wrong way. My people skills to lack from time to time.
We've had a good friendship in the past and I wouldn't want to affect 
that in anyway, but equally I feel I must say what I believe when in 
disagreement especially as your tone was "my way or the highway".

>  I am
> proposing to do work to address an issue which is relevant to some
> (many, in my view) people.  I'm sorry if you're not one of those
> people. Please also see comments inline, below.

Oh don't get me wrong, changing from CVS is very relevant to me. I just 
feel that going to git directly is the wrong approach.
By moving to fossil as the main repository it allows several things

1. We can ship fossil in the base system quite easily - this is just not 
practical with git as functionality dependant on python or perl would 
not work.
2. It's possible to have a bi directional fossil <-> git bridge

While 2. would equally work with git as the "main" repository I strongly 
feel that NetBSD should be self updating from the base system.
Also, you then get to work with the SCM of your choice. I choose fossil, 
you choose git.
I'm also sure that there could be caveats to this approach, but equally 
I think it warrants investigation.

> > So in summary
> > 1) You feel that NetBSD is a left-behind software project
>
> Ok, this was supposed to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek, and I didn't do
> a good job of indicating that.  I've been working with netbsd for
> quite nearly 20 years at this point, and yes, in many ways (not the
> most important, or I wouldn't bother!) it is left behind - just to
> keep up, in many ways, requires substantially more effort for a
> NetBSD-based project than many others.  It is, no question, a "special
> snowflake" in a lot of ways.  I have also put a fair amount into
> working with other SCMs - monotone is *still* my favorite, and it does
> stuff that no other SCM does.  Stuff that would be good to have.  But
> it has shortcomings (as do all of the other solutions) that I'm not
> prepared to address.  All of the solutions have shortcomings.  See
> below.

I've spent over 20 years myself with open source, although only recently 
in comparison with NetBSD.
As to the last point all software design that differs has a shortcoming 
somewhere compared to another product.
If we had the one design fits all mentality then we, nor NetBSD, would 
be here.

> > 2) You want to go with the crowd (which crowd?) chosen SCM regardless 
> > of other merits
> Um, no.  I do, however, want to be able to occasionally leverage other
> people's work to solve problems similar to those I have had. Just once
> in a while, maybe, I want to find that someone else has already solved
> the problem I had - an experience that I've been having less and less
> for NetBSD over the years.

Not seeing how this is relevant to Git vs the World.
I can understand it when compared to CVS and it's craptastic web viewer, 
but pretty much anything else helps me to find solutions via changesets.
I'm amazed that FreeBSD uses svn (yay changesets) but they use ViewVC 
still (wtf is a changeset???)

> > 3) Source code management isn't important for you
>
> No; what I said (or meant to say, anyway) was that it's not the
> primary focus of what I want to work on.  I'm not proposing to switch
> away from cvs, yet, (and if/when we do, it's by no means certain that
> we would do so for git) but I would like to take advantage of git's
> popularity to make it easier for others to try this OS that I love and
> have put so many unpaid hours into over the years.

I would argue that this only affect developers, not users.
Well, unless users update their sources via CVS, but that isn't really a 
pain.
That being said, I buy into the fact that we lose some by currently 
using CVS.
However, I don't buy into the fact that going to something less popular 
than git would be detrimental than going with git.

I would even argue that because fossil is more suited to our workflow 
and ideals (at least as it seems to me) we would lose less developers 
who would leave due to sticking with CVS or moving to GIT.
At this point I don't see that changing to GIT gains developers, anymore 
than changing to fossil would. It seems to me more relevant to change so 
not to alienate current developers.

Thanks

Roy