[Kde-scm-interest] On Amarok Switching to Git

[Boyd Stephen Smith Jr.]

On Saturday 17 January 2009, Casey Link <unnamedrambler at gmail.com> wrote 
about 'Re: [Kde-scm-interest] On Amarok Switching to Git':
>Leo and I brought this topic up at a break a few minutes ago during
>Camp KDE, and immediately Chani and Thomas jumped in. We started
>discussing technical and social hurdles that have to be crossed before
>all of KDE can ditch svn for good.

Well, Thiago went into a few of them in Message-id: 
<200901180017.06567.thiago at kde.org>.

First, of all Amarok developers need to purge their tree of "svn:extern"s, 
handling them is non-trivial in git and I don't think anyone is really 
interested in that work.

Beyond that, I think all the other issues can be resolved "in conference" 
with the Amarok developers.  I know Thiago isn't volunteering, but I 
*think* there are others on the list that may have time to discuss (and 
possibly implement) this.  I work a normal, US-Central, 40 hour week, so I 
could only kick in 8-10 hours a week regularly, irregular hours, on the 
weekend.  I think the Amarok team would like administrativa to have a 
faster turn-around time *AND*

I'm not willing to do the work unless I have a couple of people I trust to 
add more hours.  I feel setting up a model KDE git infrastructure 
is "full-time work" for at least a few months until things get ironed out.

>The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of Amarok
>switching to git initially before the rest of KDE. There are two
>primary advantages to Amarok switching to git:
>
>1) The selfish reason: Amarok devs can finally share branches, and
>fully utilize the power of git.
>2) The egalitarian reason: We can blaze the trail for the rest of KDE,
>by squashing bugs, annoyances, and generally pioneering the mass
>svn->git switch.

I see both reasons as valid.  However, I thought being "part of KDE" meant 
being maintained under the same source control.  That said, Amarok 
survived fine being not "part of KDE" in the past and I think it could 
flourish there again.

If I git<->svn bridge needs to be built between a Amarok git tree and a KDE 
svn tree, that could be a problem.  The stock "git svn" doesn't *really* 
support this.  All the history would have to be linearized regularly; even 
modern subversion doesn't handle branch merges the way git does.  This 
means that all git-using Amarok developers would have to regularly rebase.  
However, Amarok developers using "git svn" already have to do this a lot; 
if the majority have already switched to git, this might actually reduce 
the number of rebases.

I have some ideas about building the bridge, but they aren't solidified, 
and would require the SVN repository to be the "canonical" version.  Since 
client-side SVN doesn't have any method of "rewriting history" it's pretty 
impossible to "rebase" a svn commit on top of a git commit.  That, coupled 
with the lack of svn:commit hooks that fail (AFAIK), makes it very 
difficult to operate with the git repository being "canonical".

>There has been lots of discussion on this list (scm-interest) and
>actual work done regarding the switch, why don't we attempt an actual
>switch using only a small subset of KDE (Amarok)?

Are you volunteering?  I'm trying to get some local support here (I live 
with 1 other developer and 2 system administrators [CC'd]) but all of us 
would be unknowns in the KDE development community, so I think Amarok 
might be better supported with at least a few volunteers that are already 
known (trusted, really) in the community.
-- 
Boyd Stephen Smith Jr.                     ,= ,-_-. =. 
bss at iguanasuicide.net                     ((_/)o o(\_))
ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy           `-'(. .)`-' 
http://iguanasuicide.net/                      \_/     
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