Hosting and Supporting GIT conversion of Fedora CVS to enable downstream development efforts and distributions

[Josh Boyer]

On Wed, 28 Nov 2007 09:59:28 -0900
"Jeff Spaleta" <jspaleta at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Nov 28, 2007 9:15 AM, Josh Boyer <jwboyer at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Frankly, I don't think the Board has any business in this discussion
> > yet.  There are known pain points in providing this (and switching SCMs
> > all together), the benefits to Fedora are little to none at the moment,
> > and it can be hosted elsewhere.
> 
> I don't see much here that needs rubber stamping from the board.
> Let me sum up where i think the discussion is at:
> 
> 1) A community member has done the necessary work to implement a way to make
> a copy of fedora's cvs and turn it into something git friendly.  This
> gives downstream people who are comfortable with git a way a new
> interact with our package sources. This is not a bad thing, and I
> decree that as a board member such initiative should be applauded.
> I'd send him a t-shirt and some stickers, but I don't have any.
> 
> 2) This person feels comfortable enough with how its working to want
> to expose this as a public consumable for other people. The question
> is how to best do that.
> 
> 3) There are some concerns about doing this as part of infrastructure
> right now.  There is some resource duplication here and since git has
> not been selected as the next piece of technology to use its not clear
> that providing git as a fedora services versus some other technology
> is worth the resource burn.  If there was a long term directive to
> move to git for Fedora's usage, then there would be a compelling
> reason to burn internal infrastructure resources to duplicate cvs into
> git.
> 
> 4) Infrastructure is willing to help make it easier for a community
> hosted solution to get access to cvs for duplication.
> 
> Do I have the story so far?  If there isn't a cohesive plan to start
> transitioning to git internally over sometime scale, I'm not sure
> exactly what I'm suppose to be supporting.  I've got other things I'd
> like to see infrastructure diskspace and human resources used for like
> spin source isos, that I feel are far more critical to provide than a
> duplication of cvs content as a git consumable.  I mean I'm not going
> to actively lobby against duplicating git but I've no reason to prefer
> to see resources used for this over other things.

Agreed.

> Here's the reality as I see it. We simply can not do everything as
> part of internal infrastructure.  Sometimes this project will need to
> rely on community provided services to extend the projects
> capabilities into new areas.  Some of these things will eventually be
> pulled into the project as an internal service based on the success
> and growth of the service while it was being hosted externally. Other
> services won't be  for a variety of reasons (though none of the
> efforts should be considered failures even if they are discarded or
> reach a niche audience)

A big +10.

> What the Board needs to figure out is how to make it possible to make
> the Fedora brand a big enough tent to encompass services that are not
> internally hosted, in an equitable manner.  Encourage people to host
> community services, give credit where credit is due, and give these
> external community services some credibility as being an outgrowth of
> the project and some recognition as to the effort being made
> regardless as whether the service is adopted/co-opted by the Fedora
> project offically .

Agreed.

josh