Trialing KDE on bzr

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Sunday 20 July 2008, Alexander Neundorf wrote:
> On Sunday 20 July 2008, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> > I see no technical reason to not switch to a DVCS. There's a lot of
> > people who want to have a DVCS -- many are already using one. What's
> > stopping us now is inertia and having people to do the actual conversion
> > work.
>
> Inertia sounds so negative...

yes; it's also true though =) how about ... "what's stopping us now is that we 
haven't started yet and it takes a fair amount of energy to get the ball 
rolling at first" ;)

> IMHO right now we need to concentrate on getting KDE4 into a shape where it
> can be a full replacement for 3.5, feature and stabilitywise. We're not
> there yet.

i think at this point that's nearly a matter of splitting hairs. we're close 
enough(tm) with 4.1; and really, just getting to "as good as 3.5" is a bit of 
an underachiever's goal. it'd be nice to take that "recreate our past" 
millstone off our neck and start focussing on more in-the-present goals for 
kde4 releases.

but i think you and i agree on the basics:

we have yet to release a kde4 version that reflects the true potential of kde4 
and right now we have an amazing amount of momentum across the entire set of 
KDE projects. we shouldn't screw with that momentum at this exact point in 
time; getting a release that more fully realizes the potential in kde4 would 
be intelligent before going through the disruption of infrastructure changes.

that said, just as the cmake switch was a smart long term thing which 
delivered huge short term pain (and significantly slowed kde4 development for 
many of us during that time period), a switch to a better VCS is a good long 
term idea for many reasons.

so, i do agree with you that now is not the time to do such a switch, though 
at some well chosen point in time it can deliver improvements akin to our 
other infrastructure changes we've made in the last 2 years.

> Switching a major component as the VCS wouldn't help with this right now
> but slow things down. So I'd say we shouldn't consider switching the VCS
> before KDE 4.2 or 4.3 is released.

agreed; but if the goal would be to switch after 4.3 (~1 year) that would 
pretty much require planning and starting *now*. it's not the sort of task you 
can do in a week or even a month; again much like the cmake transition we went 
through =)

i do trust the vcs interest group to make the right decisions here; as such, 
i'd only ask that the vcs interest group take into consideration matching any 
vcs change to our devel schedules and goals so as to preserve our current 
momentum as much as possible. keeping the rest of us on k-c-d in the loop as 
to such timelines will help immensely to that end. =)

> P.S. I'd prefer hg: easy to use, there is a hg book, and there are nice
> GUIs for it, e.g. TortoiseHg

a good point. that said, even i can figure out git these days and there are a 
huge number more people familiar with git than hg and bzr combined. note that 
our upstreams are also using git more these days. some of my SoC students are 
using git, we've used git for krunner devel ... that kind of usage is 
personally more important for me, but then i'm a conservative on VCS issues =)

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Trolltech

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