17 May
2013
17 May
'13
12:28 a.m.
On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 7:02 PM, Sergiu Dumitriu <sergiu(a)xwiki.org> wrote:
On 05/16/2013 12:16 PM, Vincent Massol wrote:
I usually use my IDE for exploring history, not the command line, so this
is not that simple IMO.
You say it will work for most files, it is just a guess... we should check
that for real.
On May 16, 2013, at 6:09 PM, Vincent Massol <vincent(a)massol.net> wrote:
>
> On May 16, 2013, at 5:29 PM, Sergiu Dumitriu <sergiu(a)xwiki.org> wrote:
>
>> On 05/16/2013 10:54 AM, Vincent Massol wrote:
>>>
>>> On May 16, 2013, at 4:47 PM, Thomas Mortagne <
thomas.mortagne(a)xwiki.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 4:25 PM, Vincent Massol
<vincent(a)massol.net>
wrote:
>>>>> I'm rather -0 ATM and
very close to -1 because:
>>>>>
>>>>> 1) I haven't heard from a windows dev for a long time, I
don't
think that happens that often
>>>>
>>>> And it's surely not going to improve...
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> 2) It's a *huge* change and it should definitely not be done
lightly. We would need to plan a period like 2 full days, all devs would
need to stop working on what they do and help out. For example all pages on
xwiki.org having some github links are going to be broken and will need
to be updated (that's probably around hunded of pages overall)
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Yes it's a huge change, that's why it's a vote.
>>>>
>>>>> 3) Windows devs have a simple solution which is to use cygwin so
it's not a blocker
>>>>
>>>> It's not as trivial as you seems to think and it also mean that you
>>>> simply can't use the standard git tools in the Windows world like
the
>>>> Github application or Tortoisegit without speaking or any EDI git
>>>> integration... so not it really can't be seen as some obvious
>>>> solution. And it's not like using Cygwin was some king of standard
for
>>>> Windows dev. "use
cyggwin" is easy to say but the reality is that a
>>>> dev will try to clone XWiki repository with the git tool he is used
to
>>>> and will simply can't,
period.
>>>
>>> What I'm saying is that I don't think it's worth the effort. By
worth
I mean the ratio between the effort and problems it'll require from us
vs
the # of windows dev not using cygwin that'll want to develop for the xwiki
project…
>>
>> But this is why we have a democracy and not a dictatorship. If the
>> community considers it is worth the effort, and at least some devs are
>> willing to work on this, then I think it's their right to do this.
>
> 1) You should re-read the governance. It's a meritocracy, i.e we vote
important changes and devs need to be ok. So if one or a few devs want to
do this but some other don't for some valid reason then it's not going to
happen until we reach a decision.
>
> 2) It's all the devs that will bear the cost of maintaining the new
environment, no just the dev who's willing to do the initial work.
>
> BTW none of us work on a windows environment and I think it's a bad
idea
to implement support for something that we never use. It can only lead
to something that gets broken frequently. To overcome this we'd need some
windows agent and this means supporting that agent and making sure it works
all the time (we tried in the past and failed for a very simple reason:
none of the devs use windows and thus we don't care).
>
>> It's not a good move to veto the will of the community.
>
> Again (in case you didn't understand) I'm ok on the principle of doing
this move but doing cowboy-coding without thinking about the consequences
and letting other fix your stuff by only doing half of the work isn't my
preferred style…
>
> We've had enough bad examples of the dev environment being broken for
week(s not so long ago that it's normal to want to be careful...
>
>> Anyway, there are other reasons to make the change, not just Windows
>> compatibility. It saves about 2 seconds each time a dev wants to go to
a
>> directory from the command line. Going
into one subdirectory means
>> having to press "x tab <right prefix of the submodule> tab". The
first
>> two keys are superfluous since they're the same all the time. The
deeper
>> the hierarchy, the longer the time it
takes to go there. It adds up to
>> more than an hour wasted per year per dev, and I don't think it will
>> really take a whole month of every dev to do the migration. If
everybody
>> contributes and we do a systematic
effort, it could be done in an hour
>> with the right planning.
>
> So to reiterate and to be constructive, before we start any actual work
on
this I'd like that we do more evaluation. This means:
> * see a list of windows coders who have
expressed a need (apart from
Florin who I know already) and who have a real will to
participate after
the move. Do we have at least one?
This is not just about Windows. The committers that vote +1 vote for
their own environment, not just to fix a problem for hypothetical
contributors.
And it's not about improving something for existing contributors, but
removing a blocker standing in the way of future contributors. The
easier it is for a new potential community member to join, the more of
these tentative users will actually stick around. And XWiki isn't
overwhelmed by the number of contributors to afford to voluntarily keep
out those not motivated enough to actually try to find out why the
checkout fails and what needs to be done to actually have a working
environment and go through all the painful process of installing cygwin
and the the command line tools that work with cygwin.
> * that we list what needs to be done
precisely. I've identified some so
far:
> ** the git path changes
> ** modify all the xwiki.org pages linking to code
> ** git history, will we loose ability to see history of files?
Not really. In some cases we might have to add --find-copies-harder to
some commands, but it should work out of the box for most files.
Viewing the commits that affect a file on GitHub might not list pre-move
commits, but the history will s
Are you thinking about non-commiters ?
* Depending on how they're configured, our IDEs might freak out when
> ** others?
* The move will break uncommitted local changes, so all devs should try
to commit their local changes, at least in a separate local branch if
not on github. But devs shouldn't keep uncommitted changes anyway, right?
pulling for the first time, since everything will be
moved around.
* Existing pull request should still work, but Jira patches will break;
they're probably broken already anyway, since we didn't really allow new
patches to be put there for a while, and most of the paths have changed
since 1-2 years ago.
And any patches maintained by potential existing users for their own use.
* Does anything on Jenkins depend on paths? I hope not, configurations
use module names, and they will continue to point to the right POM.
* I guess this still counts as xwiki.org changes, but we should make
sure the pages that work with remote files, like the syntax
documentation and syntax completion report, will also need to be updated.
* Existing links in emails (and other places with answers like
stackoverlow) will be broken, but that already happens whenever we move
a module, for example to make room for api+ui+test submodules, and this
happened a lot recently, so it's not a new problem.
* Most annoying: forgetting our own reflex of typing x+tab when changing
the path :-)
--
Denis Gervalle
SOFTEC sa - CEO
eGuilde sarl - CTO
** what happens to the JIRA links to commits in
the Commits tab? Will
they still work?
Yes, the existing commits will not change.
Thanks
-Vincent
> * to list who is ok to participate actively in the move
> * that we agree on a date so that it doesn't impact our planned roadmap
>
> Thanks
> -Vincent
>
>>> We're going to loose at least a month before we've finished that
migration completely and I'm really worried about the toll it'll have on
our releases...
>>>
>>> Thanks
>>> -Vincent
>>>
>>> PS: With the same group effort we could release a first version of
the
new model for example ;)
>>>
>>
>> --
>> Sergiu Dumitriu
--
Sergiu Dumitriu
http://purl.org/net/sergiu
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