[Kde-scm-interest] Project release tags on Gitorious

[Ian Monroe]

On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 9:28 AM, Eike Hein <hein at kde.org> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> for the least days Konversation has been actively interested
> in following Amarok's lead and moving to Gitorious ahead of
> time, with most of us already using git in some capacity and
> preferring it over SVN.
>
> However, in the course of the preparations we believe we've
> hit upon a problem with tagging on Gitorious.
>
> It appears that pushing of release tags to projects owned by
> the kde-developers team currently has to be regulated by ad-
> mins of kde-developers, which we think doesn't scale and
> also has some cultural considerations that are not desirable:
>
> - In this model, every time a project team decides it wants
>   to tag a new release (or create another kind of tag), it
>   has to go through a kde-developers admin. Even if there
>   are enough admins around, this adds just another process
>   hurdle, and if there aren't enough admins around, it can
>   really hold up things.
>
>   And while you currently have to ask a sysadmin to initia-
>   lly create an app dir in /tags for you in SVN, you don't
>   have to ask permission for every individual tag, so we
>   feel this would also be a regression vis-a-vis KDE's open
>   access culture when it comes to managing the repos.
>
> - An alternative that has been suggested (by Lydia on IRC)
>   is to make every app's release dudette/dude a kde-develo-
>   pers admin (as Lydia is one atm) to get around the above
>   problems. We don't think that makes sense: It's a bit
>   brute-force, permission-wise, and is also pretty bad from
>   a cultural POV. Right now, in KDE, a gig like being the
>   "release dude" is very meritocratic and organic - the one
>   doing the work is it. Having to actually appoint someone
>   in this way - handing out the fancy title, writing it
>   down officially in an ACL file somewhere - feels awkward.
>   KDE's always had a project culture that doesn't dwell a
>   lot on handing out fancy titles and the politics associa-
>   ted with that sort of thing; we think the switch to git
>   shouldn't make us more rigid in this regard.
>
> Basically, we think there's a need for a finer-grained per-
> mission model that allows app teams to continue as before,
> and would like to see this put on the agenda for improve-
> ment for the git transition. Comments?

Having a good solution for tagging extragear apps makes sense and it
should be on the agenda. (I don't really know of a solution though.)

I don't think its a blocker though. I do see it as mildly annoying to
have to ping a sysadmin with a git hash and version number every time
you want to tag. However I don't really see it a social disruption of
our meritocratic order though. :)

Ian