RFR: GIT Package VCS

[Jeremy Katz]

On Wed, 2007-06-06 at 14:32 -0500, Jeffrey C. Ollie wrote:
> When I first read these two posts, I thought "you guys are crazy", 

No argument here ;-)

> but
> then I thought about it a bit more and started thinking "Whoah! This
> could be really cool!"  I think what is described here could certainly
> be done with Git (it'd probably work in another distributed SCM but I'm
> less famililar with those so I can't say for sure).  

Yeah, once you start thinking about things like this it becomes pretty
clear that a DVCS is almost a requirement rather than a "it'd be
nice".  

> It also occurred to me that this would be a very big change in how we
> manage packages so maybe some kind of hybrid approach would make the
> transition easier.

Yes, it is a big change.  A huge change.  A groundbreaking change even.
Something which shows that Fedora isn't just sitting off quietly, but
innovating and doing so with toolsets that are entirely open and
available for anyone to use.

> So what about something like this:
> 
> 1.  We convert the package repository to a new SCM so that we can get
> off of CVS, but the process/workflow remains relatively unchanged.  This
> I think that we could definitely have in place by F8.
> 
> 2.  We set up a parallel package repository that enables our new
> workflow.  When a package maintainer is ready to move a package to the
> new workflow, building from the old-style repository is disabled and the
> package is built from the new-style one.

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