Heads-up: kdeutils is moving to git

[Eike Hein]

On 08/21/2011 05:58 AM, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On Sunday, August 21, 2011 00:10:07 Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
>> Superbuild is unrelated and orthogonal to the code in kdeutils to
>> allow building as a single module.
>
> yes, and that's the challenge here: it takes ~10 seconds to put a bunch of
> "add_subdirectory" calls into a CMakeLists.txt file. the issue is having to
> manually keep up a bunch of git repositories individually, from cloning to
> pulling, ensuring they are in the correct hierarchy initially on disk, etc.

I'm getting a really weird deja-vu here.

This issue of "how do we deal with sets of repositories" has been
discussed many times over the last four years. Every time it was
discussed, the solution that resulted was "write some kind of tool
to handle them, operating on a master file of repo info". This was
the case even when it was you and Chani who was taking the lead on
the git migration - that's what you guys put into the task wiki for
it.

So that's exactly what we did and have today:
* https://projects.kde.org/kde_projects.xml contains hierarchical
   information about projects and their repositories.
* kdesrc-build has support for using the above XML file to under-
   stand the notion of "kdeutils" and clone, pull and build it.

kdesrc-build is not something scary. It's a proven, well-documented
tool with a stable and dependable maintainer who has worked on it
for years and has been swift to adapt to new requirements. Dis-
missing it ('"use kdesrcbuild" and similar answers are not good
enough') doesn't make any sense to me. Handling repo sets is a non-
trivial problem that takes work to solve, and that work has been
done here. There's no magic simpler way. Other communities who
have the same kind of problem had to write similar tools (e.g.
Android's "repo" tool).

So ... why are we now pretending that (a) this is a new problem and
(b) the only ever proposed solutions don't already exist?

Further, why is this getting dumped on the fine folks who did the
kdeutils migration? I'm incredibly pissed that what's probably the
smoothest and best-prepated git migration done yet is being buried
under this amount of bitching. Do you realize how few people work
on doing the thankless and unsexy job of making these moves happen
(I'm not among them, so I'm not defending myself here) and that it
sucks when their motivation gets threatened further by this kind
of response?


-- 
Best regards,
Eike Hein