[Kde-scm-interest] Sysadmin advice regarding Monolithic vs Split repositories.

[Ian Monroe]

On Tue, Sep 7, 2010 at 1:20 PM, Torgny Nyblom <kde at nyblom.org> wrote:
> On Tue, 07 Sep 2010 18:04:40 +0200
> Tom Albers <toma at kde.org> wrote:
>
>> Dear Scm-interest,
>>
>> As promised, the people behind the sysadmin team would like to give
>> advice regarding the monolithic vs split repositories issues. We have
>> tried to stay away from the community/social issues and focus on the
>> technical consequences such a decision involves - such as how to
>> setup the different services we will setup.
>>
>> Our advise is to use a split repositories approach.

It was always my impression that sysadmin concerns were one of the
main reasons to have monolithic repos. So if there is sysadmin
consensus then that sounds like a good reason to split.

One thing that is missing from the proposed solution is a way to keep
an up-to-date checkout of 'kdereview' or 'kdegames'. It's not a
difficult to think of a solution for it (we were kicking around an
idea of having a script do this). So far the sysadmin seems to be
quite good at finding solutions, maybe you can tackle this issue as
well? Obviously integration with Redmine would be the ideal. If
Redmine already produces a computer-readable description of project
hierarchy it would really be trivial.

(regardless each git repo needs to be able to build itself
independently as well, I'm not contesting that).

> I agree that this makes the most sense, but I wonder how the kdepim
> module(s) (and others?) should handle this with regards to preserving
> history in the conversion process.
>
> In the kdepim module(s) there has been (and are) a lot of files/subdirs
> moving between the different applications and libraries. Writing rules
> for all of these moves so that history is complete for all would be
> gits would be near impossible.

Keeping lossless history is near impossible even with monolithic
repos, especially in the case of complicated repos like KDEPIM. Please
disabuse me if this problem is a solved issue.

Even in trivial cases like Dragon Player moving to kdemultimedia from
kdereview and playground, svn2git isn't able to track. So if anything
multiple repos would aid in maintaining history. In general though a
lossless conversion seems impossible, and we should just be open to
keeping a copy of SVN around.

Ian