Git Migration Needs YOU!

[Till Adam]

On Tuesday 02 March 2010 16:46:21 Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On March 2, 2010, Till Adam wrote:
> > Not to spoil the party here, but for kdepim, we see a few more blockers
> > for a migration to git. Before I explain them, let me make one thing very
> > clear:
> 
> to summarize without going into answering your queries (others are better
>  for that than me ;):
> 
> 	you are asking for the move to happen no sooner than 6 weeks from now.
> 
> is that correct? if so, can you offer a firm commitment to that time frame
> from the kdepim side? e.g. if there was an April 15th deadline (to pick a
> number out of a hat), the kdepim team could commit to that?

Certainly not :). More below.

> the reason i ask: i'm trying to pin down a firm schedule here, something
>  which simply has not been happening to date and which has removed our
>  ability to execute. that schedule needs to take "everyone" into
>  consideration, it needs to be as accurate as possible and it also needs to
>  be as aggressive as it can be.

I totally agree that this needs a schedule, and a firm and accurate one. I also 
partially agree that that schedule should be aggressive. Partially, because we 
need to make sure we are not aggressive to the point of harming our goals for 
4.5, our friends  up- and down-stream and our commercial ecosystem. The latter 
is possibly more of a concern for PIM than elsewhere in KDE, as we have such 
an ecosystem and have had it in place for a while, which means there are more 
people relying on our current ways of working who are not tightly in tune with 
KDE than elsewhere in our project. They need to be heard, or at least given a 
chance to have input on the time line. That input needs to be collected, which 
I'm happy to facilitate. That is ongoing, at least in the Kolab realm, which I 
can reach.

> also, can you nominate someone from the kdepim community who can act as the
> git migration liaison to offer direction on things like the module
>  splitting as well as get communication between kdepim and the git miration
>  team flowing as needed?
> 
> (in a more-perfect world, someone from the kdepim community would be
>  working on the merge rules for kdepim. :)

I'm very thankful that Torgny and Ingo have volunteered to help with this. 
We'll also nominate someone from the KDAB team to liaise with them, make sure 
our concerns are given due consideration (as I have no doubt they will) and 
help out as much as possible.

As for the actual time line, the 6 weeks I mentioned are an effort estimate, 
not a wall clock time one. We cannot just drop everything and start attacking 
that particular issue, there are many other things to do, most notably making 
kdepim trunk usable again, so that more people can help out with testing and 
fixing it, so we can get it into shape for 4.5, but also project commitments 
and constraints. Since nearly all of the KDAB kdepimsters are currently in a 
project sprint meeting, I won't get a chance to discuss possible time lines 
with them until next week. Unfortunately (for this discussion, not for me ;) I 
will be in Brasil then, speaking about Akonadi on mobile devices at Bossa 
conference. I would thus like to ask that we get a chance to suggest a time 
line that works for KDAB wrt our ongoing projects and external commitments, 
discuss it with the wider PIM community, and then commit to it, which will 
likely take all of next week easily. 6 weeks from now as an earliest possible 
move date is definitely totally out of the question, I'm afraid. :/

As to the other issues raised in my first mail in this thread, I'm happy to see 
the translations problem addressed, but we're still quite unsure especially 
when it comes to how to structure our work flows to allow for relatively 
painless merging between modules/branches, etc. Who would be a good person or 
group to discuss this with? Do the gitorious guys have experience with these 
things? I imagine so. Can they be made to help us do the right thing, 
procedurally here? If they need to get paid to do that, I'm sure we can find a 
way to make that possible too. I guess we should take that part of the 
discussion to the scm list, though. Repeating the request for help here mostly 
to motivate those in the know to approach the PIM team and shed some light on 
these things, if they can. 

Thanks to everyone working on this for their consideration of our (KDAB's and 
KDEPIM's) needs, and thanks to Aaron for showing much needed leadership on 
this issue.

Till