[Kde-scm-interest] Re: GSoc branch best practices

[Ben Cooksley]

On Sun, May 1, 2011 at 4:13 PM, Raphael Kubo da Costa <kubito at gmail.com> wrote:
> Marcel Wiesweg <marcel.wiesweg at gmx.de> writes:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I would be interested on best practices with git branches for our gsoc
>> students, assuming the students do not work on master.
>>
>> With SVN, we always had one dedicated branch for all students, regularly
>> synced with trunk. With git, I see some more possibilities:
>>
>> 1) One branch per student
>>       1a) regularly rebased on master
>>       1b) changes regularly merged from master, merged to master at finish
>> 2) One branch for all students, merged at finish
>>
>> Any KDE projects with experience from last year? Plans for this year?
>
> The same question was asked about a month ago here [1], but nobody gave
> any opinion at that time.
>
> Is there any reason not to let each student use a personal clone, so
> that rebasing is easier?

Commits will not result in mails to kde-commits, etc. so the mentor
will have to keep a close eye upon the repositories directly in order
to perform code reviews. It will also mean that other members of the
KDE Community who might do code review simply based on mails to
kde-commits won't be aware of those commits.

Further, merging of these GSOC branches into the mainstream
repositories will likely require the assistance of KDE Sysadmin (for
every repository and GSOC merge that you perform), as the number of
commits made by a GSOC student is extremely likely to be above 100. If
this approach was taken for even half of the GSOC projects (about 25)
then this would generate quite a bit of work.

Also note that rebasing the code in may be a complicated process as
well, especially if the code changes frequently (and also means that
the state of the code may be different - as the code changed due to
the rebase)

Finally, for those projects which require modifications to other parts
of KDE not directly developed by the mentor may have issues if any
code they haven't seen before is suddenly merged in or deposited to
them for review.

>
> [1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.kde.scm-interest/2032
>
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Regards,
Ben Cooksley
KDE Sysadmin