TagLib development

[Michael Smith]

2009/11/4 Lukáš Lalinský <lalinsky at gmail.com>:
> Hi,
> we have discussed possible VCS options for TagLib development with
> Jeff and Scott some time ago, but I'd like to reopen the discussion
> here and make it a little more general. I'm not entirely happy with
> the infrastructure TagLib is using for development. There are two main
> things:
>
> Bug tracker: No matter how many projects use BugZilla, I find it a
> horrible bug tracker. I just got a bug report on IRC, only because
> submitting a proper bug report is not as easy as it should be. This
> made me wonder how many bug reports are we missing because of this.
> I'd like to move the TagLib bug tracker to something that doesn't
> require the user to go through a multi-page wizard with KDE-specific
> options that don't apply to TagLib, just to submit a bug report. Does
> anybody have a reason for not doing this? Two possible candidates I
> had in mind are Google Code and Launchpad. Any other options?

Personally, I like bugzilla. It's a horrible UI, but despite this it's
a better bug tracker than anything else I've used. However, taglib is
a "small" project - it doesn't get a huge number of bug reports, nor
does it have a lot of active developers. So, I don't really think a
powerful bug tracker is all that essential - using something the
maintainer is familiar with and happy using is more important.

Getting existing reports into the new system is pretty important though.

>
> VCS: There are many people with custom TagLib forks, so using a
> distributed VCS would probably make sense. Another reason for
> switching a DVCS is that it will take some time until TagLib 2.x is
> out, so I'll need to have a branch for 1.x as well. I've been avoiding
> committing incompatible changes to SVN trunk, but I'd like to start
> working on some incompatible things. So, so far I've heard requests
> about moving to Git, but unfortunately this isn't really an option for
> me. I'd like to do this:
>
>  * Keep TagLib 1.x in SVN, with a Bazaar mirror
>  * Use Bazaar for TagLib 2.x
>
> Any objections to this? (I'm mainly looking for opinions of people who
> contributed patches to TagLib or have a custom version of TagLib.
> Please, let's not turn this to a general VCS discussion.)
>

bzr is not my favourite system, but moving on from svn is a goal I
agree with. bzr is capable and usable, so that'd be fine with me. I
wouldn't personally bother with a bzr mirror of the 1.x tree, but I
have no particular objection to it existing. I don't have commit
access to taglib at the moment, so all my patches have just gone to
bugzilla and been committed by others (i.e. you :-), so probably my
opinion here doesn't count too heavily.


Mike (one of the songbird developers - we have a substantial fork
which we're trying to reconcile with upstream)