Where to store on-going development branches

[Mark Kretschmann]

On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 10:43 PM, Ian Monroe <ian at monroe.nu> wrote:
> I'm not really a member of this development community, but since I've
> been helping with the Git transition I thought I'd send some
> unsolicited advice based on experience we've had with Amarok.
>
> I think its important to establish before you move to Git where you
> want branch development to take place. Its not realistic to say you
> want things to just continue on in master like before. SVN forces this
> workflow and its actually rather unnatural to keep your development
> branch purely local. With git its quite easy even for novices to work
> with a couple branches and remote repos. So they will. :)
>
> There's a few options:
> 1) If you check out:
> http://community.kde.org/Sysadmin/GitKdeOrgManual#Commands_to_manage_personal_repositories
> you can see that git.kde.org can be used to create personal repos.
> Folks can then store their development branches here.
> 2) Permissions on the main Calligra repo could be set to allow anyone
> to create a branch (this is the default I think) and everyone could
> just push their work here.
> 3) Or you can not decide on anything and then folks will have branches
> on git.kde.org, Gitorious, github, their granny's web server, or won't
> publish them at all and then you're screwed if the patch they sent you
> doesn't apply anymore.
>
> (guess which one Amarok picked :D)
>
> Personally I rather like the second option. It sounds a bit messy, but
> if you have some simple branch namespace management (prefixing with
> nick) it should be fine, and you can move old branches into a separate
> historic repo during periodic cleanings. Option 1 might have some
> advantages when it comes to dealing with permission issues.
>
> But both option 1 and option 2 are better then 3. Other workflow
> issues (eg how to use reviewboard) can be discussed and handled later,
> its just hard to convince people to change which git repository they
> work in. Developers can be rather shy with their ongoing work.

Public branches are the way to go. Sitting on some secret Git repo in
your basement does not help anyone.

-- 
Mark Kretschmann
Amarok Developer, Software Engineer at KO GmbH
Fellow of the Free Software Foundation Europe
http://amarok.kde.org - http://fsfe.org - http://kogmbh.com