Call me pessimistic, but... there seem to be two givens in the world of
software that concern me with this change at this time.
1) a ".0" release is notoriously not perfect and is usually followed on
very quickly by a .1 release shortly after to fix some glaring bug that
will prevent most people from using it.
2) switching to a new source code control system is a slow process that
takes a while to get over all the hurdles of process, development,
migration, etc.
So, there's no guarantee either one of these would be true for uportal,
but... if they were. Then we could be in a situation where we're unable
to produce a critically needed 4.0.1 release, because we're not
completely up to development speed on git.
For example, what if there is an import/export bug, you want Drew Wills
to fix. He's the best guy for the job. If the code was still in svn,
he probably still has a checkout of it and he can take a look at it
today. But if the code only exists in git, he might not have gotten
around to doing anything with git yet. Even the github svn url you can
use, would still require him changing his environment.
My 'vote' was 0. Basically I'm saying I won't stand in the way of it
happening, but I don't believe the time is right to fully support it
right now either.
---- Cris J H
On 08/31/2011 02:05 PM, Eric Dalquist wrote:
I'm curious as yo why the concern about the closeness to the 4.0
release? I was actually thinking that doing the switch as soon as
possible after 4.0 would be better as it would give more time for
developers to get used to the change before a 4.0.1 is needed.
-Eric
On 8/31/11 3:05 PM, Cris J Holdorph wrote:
+/- 0
I think making this change so soon after the uPortal 4.0.0 release, is
a mistake. I think it would be better to let that release simmer for a
while to shake out if there were any major problems.
If this vote was to take place in a month, or at least 2 weeks after
some university was running uPortal 4.0.0 in production, then my vote
might be different.
---- Cris J H
On 08/31/2011 12:26 PM, Eric Dalquist wrote:
I'd like to see uPortal's source code moved to git and hosted on GitHub.
There have been quite a few folks that have been working on uPortal 4,
uMobile or are otherwise interested that have asked about using git.
After looking into it a bit more I think it would be a very valuable
change for uPortal.
For those not familiar Git is a _distributed_ source control tool. What
that means is there is no true central repository like there is with
SVN. Developers don't really checkout some version of the code, they
clone the entire project when doing work. That doesn't prevent the
convention of a central repository which is what a site like GitHub
provides. A place to host a clone of the project that by convention we
agree is the master copy of the project.
GitHub adds some very nice social-coding aspects to git. Primarily it
provides a VERY easy interface that allows anyone to clone a project,
make changes and commit them to their clone, then make a pull request on
the master project. Once that has happened a simple click of a button is
all it takes for any developer with commit access on the master to
accept the changes and merge them in. This process makes it very easy
for people without direct commit access to commit changes that are
reviewed by a core developer before merging in and significantly
simplifies the work of the core developers.
When there was first talk among about switching I solicited feedback
from the Fluid project which recently moved from SVN to Git. I highly
recommend reading the resulting thread which highlights a lot of the
pros and cons http://old.nabble.com/Perspectives-on-Git-td31852449.html
There is an eclipse Git Plugin, a TortiseGit client which is a clone of
TortiseSVN and I believe most other IDEs have either built in or plugin
support for git.
Some other useful links:
Git for those without Version Control background -
http://hoth.entp.com/output/git_for_designers.html
GitHub's wonderful help documentation - http://help.github.com/
TortiseGit - http://code.google.com/p/tortoisegit/
Some questions that I can try and answer before they come up:
- The uPortal code in svn at source.jasig.org would likely be left in
place, we would just make the entire /uPortal directory read-only
- We're going to filter out the documentation and website files that
were included in early versions of uPortal 2 to reduce the project
repository size.
Since this is a big change (and since I'm going on vacation for 2 weeks
starting Friday) I'm planning on leaving this vote open for a while. +1,
0, -1 to vote and if you vote -1 you need to include a detailed
reasoning for your -1 vote.
-Eric
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