16 May
2013
16 May
'13
6:09 p.m.
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:
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).
On May 16, 2013, at 4:47 PM, Thomas Mortagne <thomas.mortagne(a)xwiki.com> wrote:
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. On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 4:25 PM, Vincent Massol
<vincent(a)massol.net> wrote:
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… 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. 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?
* 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?
** others?
* 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