Sysadmin Load Reduction: Subversion Infrastructure

[Luigi Toscano]

Nate Graham ha scritto:
> On 11/9/19 4:50 PM, Nicolás Alvarez wrote:
>> El sáb., 9 de nov. de 2019 a la(s) 20:29, Nate Graham (nate at kde.org) escribió:
>>>
>>> Not knowing anything about the translation system we use... what are the
>>> blockers to moving it over to git?
>>>
>> Not necessarily in order:
>> - Experiment conversion to git and see if the resulting repo(s) are of
>> a reasonable size (I vaguely recall seeing bad results with this)
>> - Convince and teach every translator to use git (expect lots of friction here)
>> - Make scripty use git instead of svn (likely lots of work)
>> - Some language teams have their own tooling (local for translation,
>> or web for statistics) that would need to be gitified too. For
>> example, the Spanish team developed KSvnUpdater.
>> - Update lots of documentation in different languages (eg.
>> https://es.l10n.kde.org/repositorio.php)
>>
>> You may even need to migrate languages one by one (as you convince
>> each language team?), so in the meantime all tooling would need to
>> support both repos at the same time.
>>
>> It doesn't sound like fun...
>
> Thanks for the background.
> 
> If we're going to keep SVN, I think we need to fully support it. If we don't
> have the resources to do this on an ongoing basis, then we need to invest the
> resources now/soon to move away from it. I don't see any other realistic options.

New resources is the solution. Please see the other emails: the problem
discussed is not subversion itself, but the web interface.

> 
> Again, from a totally non-translation perspective, I am somewhat surprised to
> hear that individual translators are required to be proficient in a source
> control system. Perhaps de-coupling the workflow from direct interaction with
> the SCM would be beneficial? Isn't this what GUI apps like KLocalize do? If
> not, can it be modified to do the SCM interaction? This seems like a solvable
> problem.

Most of translators are not so technical as the developers. And even
developers can shoot them in the foot with git, I see many issues coming from
unwanted merges.
Also, in addition to some of the problem described above (not all of them are
blocker IMHO), more relevant: how would you convert the SVN repositories into git?
- a unique repository would be the easier way, and required by people who do
changes to all the languages (renamed and moves) but I can only foresee tons
of merging issues when committing (see above).
- a repository per language would mean a tons of work whenever you need to do
a global operation, and right now it's a no go.


-- 
Luigi