[Kde-scm-interest] Layout of Git repositories for KDE

[Johannes Sixt]

Thiago Macieira schrieb:
> My concern, however, is for modules in playground when evolving. If we 
> actually *move* the repository, the URL changes and everyone's remotes will 
> have to be changed, as well as alternates set up locally and submodules.

But only people who actually had the module checked out are affected. Only 
after the module went into /stable many more people would be affected. This 
means that there better be good plans where to put the module before it goes 
to /stable.

>>> 4) the "projects" tree is where named projects are undertaken. The layout
>>> is not specified.
>>>   Named projects are those that have a declared objective. Therefore,
>>> they also have a life time: when the goal is reached, the code is merged
>>> back into "stable" and the repository is deleted. If the project is
>>> abandoned, the code is also merged, but with merge strategy "ours".
>> Why do this? To keep the history? I don't think that's necessary. If a
>> project turns out not to be worth it, why keep it? If it's valuable to
>> someone, then that someone can keep a private clone.
> 
> Yeah, I am afraid of just deleting history. If the project turned out to be 
> total crap, then don't keep it. But if it did something useful but proved to 
> be ahead of its time or not acceptable, we should merge back so as to not 
> lose the changes.

Then using strategy "ours" is the wrong thing to do. This basically *hides* 
all the changes that are merged in, and it becomes impossible to merge them 
again (without playing games) if they later turn out to be valuable.

The better option is to move the history to a branch (possibly read-only) in 
the /stable hierarchy.

> That doesn't address the problem of old commits still pointing to the old 
> tree. In general, it seems that moving repositories is a bad idea if they've 
> ever been a submodule.

Basically, yes. But the location can be tuned locally (in the config file), 
so after a really long grace period it is still "safe" to move a submodule: 
Anyone who has some incentive to checkout a really old version can fix the 
location.

-- Hannes