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

[Arno Rehn]

On Tuesday 07 September 2010 18:04:40 Tom Albers 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.
> 
> The sysadmin team would like to setup the services real soon now, so we
> ask this list to come up with a final decision about the setup. To be
> clear: whatever you decide, we will implement it to the best of our
> capabilities.
Actually, why don't we just let the main developers of the respective modules 
decide which layout they want to have? I've now often read generalising 
comments such as

"[split/monolithic repos] will make it easier for people to [insert some 
action here]"

However I'm pretty sure that none of the people on this list know the specific 
needs of each and every KDE module. And as we see, there are already projects 
that are certainly going to deviate from whatever layout we [have already/have 
now/will somewhen have] decided upon:

* kdelibs will certainly stay monolithic
* kdebindings will certainly split up
* kdepim will do something in between and split 'just a bit'

I do see that there are things affecting 'outsiders' - like a more user 
friendly Redmine UI (one click vs. two clicks to get to source code...), an 
easier way to access single components/the whole stack provided by a module 
and advantags/disadvantages for packagers.
But we shouldn't forget that the people who have to deal most with the 
repositories are the *active developers* of KDE.
Split repositories might make it easier for Joe Developer to jump right into 
the action and get his first patches sent to reviewboard - but that doesn't 
really matter if that layout hinders productivity of the rest of the team.

So I'd propose to let the main module developers decide on which layout to 
choose for the respective module. Would it be that hard to create polls for 
every module and just see what comes out of that?

-- 
Arno Rehn
arno at arnorehn.de