-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 I'm very encouraged and excited by all the interest from developers who want to get involved in the Mailman project. I've always wanted to broaden the sphere of developers beyond the current core three (though I can't say enough about the great job Tokio and Mark do). I think this is a good time to ask whether we should move from Subversion to Bazaar <http://www.bazaar-vcs.org> for our source code revision control system.
There are plusses and minuses, and I will not make the decision unilaterally (unless you want me to. :). Certainly, Tokio's and Mark's opinions are very important here because they are currently doing exceptional work on the 2.1 branch and I don't want to jeopardize that! Let me outline my thinking here and get your feedback. Bazaar is a distributed version control system. This is really the crucial different between centralized systems such as Subversion and CVS, and it's the main draw for wanting to switch. Using a dvcs such as Bazaar really changes the way we as developers work on the code, and the way other non-privileged developers can interact with the project. The biggest differences are that you can work completely disconnected from the central server, and you need have no special permissions to have *and publish* fully revision controlled personal branches. The cons are that it's not as mature as Subversion or CVS, but I have confidence that it's pretty stable. It has not yet reached a 1.0 release, but I think that's coming soon. (It's been ported to *nix, OS X, and Windows, and it's written in Python if that matters). It does not have all the features of Subversion (e.g. nested branches or externals), but it has enough to make it useable for everyday development. It takes some getting used to for existing Subversion and CVS users, and the documentation is not as good. But I think people can pick it up fairly quickly and there's a lot of effort being put into it. Full disclosure: my company Canonical is the driving force behind Bazaar, and uses it internally for all our development. It's free software though, so no worries on that front. I would not recommend it for the Mailman project though unless I thought it could solve some real problems, that it was stable enough to rely on, and that Mailman would benefit from using it. Having insiders to heckle helps, but it wouldn't be enough if that's all there was. What problems does it solve? Well, I'm /still/ struggling to merge in the work I did while on the train to PyCon in Dallas because of all the contortions I had to go through to work off-line for a couple of days. Bazaar solves this by allowing me to do everything I need to do while completely disconnected, except push my changes to the master branch. I could have committed, branched, merged, reverted, etc. all in a completely revision controlled way while off-line, and then I could have merged all my changes back to the master branch when I got back on-line. It also solves a problem I have of many live branches. Branches in Bazaar are cheap, unlike in Subversion. This means I can easily create branches for my Elixir experiments, for the move to eggs, for playing with 5 different templating engines, etc. And it's easy to merge between these. I can also have private branches that need never see the embarrassing light of day until they are stable enough to merge into the main line. What problems does it solve for you? Well, if you're a developer wanting to contribute to Mailman but we don't know you well enough to give you commit privileges, you almost don't care. You can branch from the main branch, and have a fully revision controlled private branch at your disposal. You can do commits, branches, merges, etc. on your local branches. You can even publish them via http, bzr+ssh, or sftp. Why is that cool? Well, say you created the best damn templating patch EVAR and you wanted everyone to see it. Just publish your branch (or create a bundle -- a mailable tarball-like unit of your changes) and pass around the URL. Anyone can then take a look at your branch, and the core developers can merge them into the mainline if we like them. It's a great way for new developers to earn some street cred with minimal admin overhead. And if we /don't/ like your changes, you do not have to maintain them as a disembodied patch. You can say "screw the Mailman guys, here's my cool fork" and have a fully revision controlled version of your own, in a way that's much easier to track with upstream than with Subversion or CVS. One more thing. If we move to Bazaar, I would host the branches on Launchpad.net, which -- full disclosure again -- is developed, managed, and paid for by my employer. Why Launchpad? Because it's convenient, I have insiders I can bug, and because it already supports hosted Bazaar branches. Let me emphasis that Canonical is in no way driving this. They don't care what we do for Mailman, and understand fully that stuff like this are community decisions. I personally think Bazaar+Launchpad will make some of our lives easier, but if you guys do not agree, we'll stick with what we've got, no harm, no foul. Please do share your opinions freely here in public, or via private email. Cheers, - -Barry -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (Darwin) iQCVAwUBRjkMDHEjvBPtnXfVAQLcXgP/fnriiMwu9gAQEvXmUiGLXLSfkcmkzyAm cqbu2QjmTm7uZapFq3WLmItfBuoVP3HkOdaa+ibpgR8WJUxt6UksbFXCSPPxmWlR tPI8BS65r0gnf0MUM3dvbvkhizGVmYkhK7gAW6dmH43Um1o5CbskkbaWjIMLJ+0L ter/gGwLu+8= =ftG9 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Mailman-Developers mailing list Mailman-Developers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-developers Mailman FAQ: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-developers%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-developers/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq01.027.htp