On 7/31/11 10:29 AM, Paul Davis wrote:
Dearest Devs,
A few months ago I did some work in preparing a solution to using Git
as a primary VCS at the ASF. Now that we have released 1.1.0 and 1.0.3
there's a bit of a lull in large events dealing with the code base. As
such I thought now would be a good time to propose the idea of moving
CouchDB to Git.
A few things on what this would mean for the community:
1. The SVN repository would no longer be the primary source for
CouchDB source code. It'll still exist for house keeping things like
the website and other bits.
2. For the time being there is no fancy integration with anything like
Gerrit. The initial phase of moving to Git will be to just test the
infrastructure aspects of the system to make sure its all configured
correctly and works reliably. This also applies to GitHub. There's no
magical "Pull request turns into JIRA ticket" or similar. GitHub will
remain as it is a currently, a read-only mirror in the GitHub
ecosystem.
3. There are a couple minor restrictions on our Git usage as required
by ASF policy. First, rewriting Git commits on master is prohibited. I
also added a feature that allows us to make branches that can't be
rewritten either in the interest of protecting release branches.
Currently, this is just a regular expression that matches
"(master)|(rel/*)" in the branch name. The second issue is that
there's always a possibility we have to revert to SVN if things break.
In this interest I've disabled inserting merge commits into those same
branches.
4. Before making the complete switch I'll end up making a handful of
Git clones to check that our history is preserved. I plan on writing a
script to make Graphviz images of the branch history and so on, but
having people volunteer to look back at the history to spot errors
would be helpful as well.
5. There are probably other things, but this is mostly to just kick
off serious discussion on making the switch.
Thoughts?
Paul
+1 for moving to Git! I'm confident it would help lower the barrier to
entry for contributions, streamline the development process, and
hopefully improve turn around time on patches, etc--most of which come
from git anyway via Github.
I realize there's load of discussion to be had on how to make this
happen, but as a community member I'd love to see Apache CouchDB on Git
with the necessary SVN housekeeping (per the ASF policies) done "in the
background."
Thanks for bringing it up, Paul!
Benjamin
@bigbluehat
