Future SCM Technology

[Jesse Keating]

On Wednesday 06 June 2007 16:37:33 Jeffrey C. Ollie wrote:
> This post was mainly meant to get the discussion started.  

Can we keep all the discussion on fedora-devel-list now though?  I hate cross 
posting and I hate posting the same thing twice (:

> After having 
> read some of the discussions on the Infrastructure list I think that you
> are right - major changes to the packager workflow should be held off
> until post F8.  However, some of the discussions on the Infratrusture
> list talked about some radical shifts (that I'm in favor of) from the
> RPM philosophy of "pristine tarballs plus patches" that I think moving
> wholesale to a different workflow by F9 may be difficult.
>
> However, I think that a two-pronged approach is possible:
>
> 1) Convert the CVS repository to a new SCM in such a way that the
> packager workflow is impacted as little as possible.  Much of the detail
> of using CVS to maintain packages is hidden from the package maintainer
> anyway (all you really need to know right now is "cvs co", "cvs up", and
> "cvs ci").  Some changes to Koji would be necessary behind the scenes
> but they would be transparent to the packager, and would be necessary
> for a new workflow as well.
>
> This conversion would largely be automatic... Several people have
> converted portions of the CVS repository into other SCMs (I know Git,
> Mercurial, and Subversion conversions have been done) and I've converted
> the whole repository (yes, all 4500+ packages) to Git.
>
> Perhaps this step could be skipped, but the more I learn about CVS the
> more I want to move away from it yesterday.  
>
> 2) In parallel, another repository would be set up to handle "new style"
> packaging (whatever "new style" ends up meaning).  Post F8, when a
> package is ready in the new-style repository an entry would be made in
> the package database and Koji would stop accepting build requests from
> the old-style repository for that package and would begin using the
> new-style repository.  F9 would be built from both old-style and
> new-style packages.  By F10 all packages would be converted to the
> new-style packages.

So for the record let me dump Jeremy's reply to this here for others to see, 
since I fully agree with it:

> The problem with a staged approach like this two-fold
> 1) Moving off of CVS is going to end up requiring a fair bit of
> relearning/retraining for people.  Even if we keep the workflow the
> same.  So by having it as a two-step thing, people have to retrain
> themselves _twice_ rather than just once.
> 2) If you let some people move and not others, then it becomes very
> difficult to know what you have to do to make changes to a specific
> package.  If you're the only person that works on something, that's not
> such a big deal... but we want to be encouraging collaboration and
> working together.  Having two different ways of doing that at the same
> time is going to mean that everyone has to get over the hump _anyway_.
> So why not just take our lumps in get there in a go.
>
> Jeremy

-- 
Jesse Keating
Release Engineer: Fedora
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