[Astlinux-devel] To github, or not to github, that is the question

[David K. <da...@ke...>]

Devs,
  For a while now I have been pondering whether to advocate for moving
Astlinux source control from Sourceforge to Github.  The reason is the
power of collaborative development brought by Github (forks, pull requests,
etc.) which will make it much easier to manage updates to AstLinux.

The problem of course is that our development processes and scripts are
pretty tied to SVN, and GIT is a "different way of doing things"

But I thought I would run a test and see what happens.  So this weekend I
used one of the migration tools (svn2git) and copied the entire AstLinux
source over to github... branches, tags, commit history and all.  And I
asked Lonnie to go kick the tires.

Github supports SVN as a client, so I was then able to svn checkout
Astlinux and successfully ran a clean build.  This is critical because for
at least some transition period Astlinux will still assume SVN in its build
environment -- but over time it is possible we could change that.

But.  And of course there is always a but.  We have run into an issue.  For
some reason the revision number is out-of-sync.  So for example on
Sourceforge astlinux branch 1.0 is at 8481, the exact equivalent on Github
thinks it is at revision 8467.  We're not sure why.

Also, Github assumes that the current dev code base is in "master" branch.
Sourceforge equivalent is "trunk" and that is migrated cleanly.  But,
another but, Astlinux on Sourceforge is using Branches/1.0 as the current
dev code base and trunk is wildly out of date.  That needs to get resolved
either on Sourceforge prior to importing to Github, or after importing.

Actions:
1) Please respond with your thoughts.  Do you see a problem if we move to
GitHub?
2) Is there a reason "trunk" is so out-of date?  Is it okay if we merge
branches/1.0 into that on Sourceforge or is it better to leave Sourceforge
in the state it is (as a permanent record) and do the merge once we are on
GitHub.
3) There are a lot of branches.  We should clean these up... delete
anything not needed.  Again decision to be made as to whether to do this on
Sourceforge prior to migration, or do the cleanup on Github. Please
identify any branches that you think should NOT be deleted.

Feel free to take a look and kick the tires at
https://github.com/dkerr64/astlinux but note that when we pull the trigger
we will host it at https://github.com/astlinux-project so any changes made
in my github account will get lost.

Personally I vote to do the migration. With 1.3 just tagged, now might be a
good time.

Thanks
David