Hey,
Thanks all for your feedback.
Since there is apparently a good degree of apprehension on changing this
workflow, which is not all to surprising, I'll slightly alter and reframe
the proposal.
Rather then "switching" to GitHub, we'll just have the new repo on GitHub
via which we access pull requests. The workflow on the WMF hosted repo does
not change. If things go well, we can gradually move more activity to
GitHub.
Below I'm addressing some raised questions and concerns:
> Are there similar plans for the SMW-related extensions?
It is really up to the maintainers of those extensions. I'm quite unhappy
with the one-size-fits-all attitude that is quite prevalent in the
MediaWiki community. In some cases it makes sense to provide support via
GitHub, in others only accepting contributions via Gerrit is the better
approach. I personally have no concrete plans for extensions such as
Semantic Maps at present. If SMW benefits from this change, then I'll of
course be considering it. For the Wikidata project, we are moving several
PHP libraries to GitHub, some of which are SMW related.
> Wouldn't it be confusing if some work is on Gerrit (MW and many other
extensions) while SMW work is on Github?
The number of potential SMW developers that are using GitHub is
significantly greater then the number of MediaWiki developers. And as we
have clear empirical evidence by now, the later group is not very eager to
contribute to SMW, so why should we throw the former, under the bus? Most
interest in SMW is coming from outside the core MediaWiki community, and
for them the current workflow is not only confusing, it is a big hassle.
> Also worth noting would be Yuvi's Github to Gerrit Bot
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Yuvipanda/G2G
Relying on this mirroring infrastructure strikes me as added complexity and
more maintenance hassle. The fewer infrastructure that can break in such a
way it seriously obstructs the development process, the better.
> Will it speed up the review process in some way? :-)))
Not initially. However if we get more people contributing, this situation
could improve. That is all very speculative however.
> This sounds like a potential for a mess, merging stuff into both
directions.
Git is a distributed version control system. Distributed. In the end there
is little difference between having a branch on a repo hosted on GitHub or
a branch on my local box. The kind of merging that will happen will not
differ much from what already happens. The tree might get deeper and more
complex if people start creating forks and whatnot, though again, this is
what Git is made for.
I anticipate no hassle whatsoever for i18n updates, as they will still come
from one source, which is the same as our current situation.
> From my point of view, you would lose visibility of development
Ah, this is part of the promise that everything will be so much better if
one uses a WMF hosted git repo. As I already implied above, this promise
fails to deliver. This is the case for SMW, and for most extensions. There
might be exceptions, though that does not help us.
pre-testing (some of the extensions) at translatewiki.net as well as
> having new releases with fewer translations, because translators have
> less or no time to translate new strings. With this scheme it can take
> two releases to fix an i18n problem and having a good translation for
> it (fix in next release, translations in next+1 release).
>
Doing a push from one repo to another is not very difficult, so we can
frequently update the WMF copy of the code, and not lose the TWN testing.
Also note how this proposal does not include extensions. Translations are
important and we should certainly not throw them under the bus. Luckily we
do not have to do this in any way even if we were to move all development
to GitHub.
Ideally TWN would directly support repos not hosted on WMF git. There are
already many MediaWiki extensions hosted only on GitHub, which are now
essentially treated as not being good enough.
> rising barriers elsewhere
How does SMW doing part of its development via GitHub and accepting
contributions via it make things elsewhere more difficult?
Cheers
--
Jeroen De Dauw
http://www.bn2vs.com
Don't panic. Don't be evil. ~=[,,_,,]:3
--
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Android is increasing in popularity, but the open development platform that
developers love is also attractive to malware creators. Download this white
paper to learn more about secure code signing practices that can help keep
Android apps secure.
http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=65839951&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk
_______________________________________________
Semediawiki-devel mailing list
Semediawiki-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/semediawiki-devel
