elilo-discuss

Re: [elilo-discuss] Please switch to GIT (or another DVCS) so that it is easy to contribute to ELILO

[jfly <fle...@us...>]

Hi Keshav,

thanks for your note.
>Hi, 
>    Can you guys please switch from CVS to GIT (or another DVCS) so
>that it is easy for users to track development of ELILO. Currently it
>is difficult to track using CVS. Thanks in advance.
GIT is great (and intended) for really large projects with 100's of 
contributors. As elilo is neither of those, and that status wont change,
I dont see the benefits warrant the time and effort. There is nothing 
that prevents you from pulling the source into your own local git 
repository and working on it within git and sending patches for 
consideration and elilo will stay on sourceforge. That being said, I 
hear you, I work with git for the kernel and Ive thought about switching
this source over to git now and then. Git is superior to CVS so I'll 
consider it again. you are the first to raise a complaint. no really.


>Off-note: Is ELILO still under active development? Because there seems
>to be no update after v3.16 which was released in March 2013 (8 months
>ago). Even if it is no longer actively maintained, providing the
>sources via GIT will allow contributors to fork the code and maintain
>it in github/gitorious/bitbucket etc..
Elilo is still actively maintained solely by me but no longer in active
development. Elilo was designed in the early 2000's for EFI and Itanium,
thats why it exists. As neither of those are very relevant any more It 
is legacy code at the end of its life cycle naturally. Im really not 
accepting new features or new feature requests. New releases are for 
major bug fixes for people that just cant live without elilo and
thats about it and I have no bugs waiting to release. 

New bootloader efforts and contributions should rightfully go to Grub2.
It is in active development, has many active contributors and is
accepting new features and it supports UEFI and secure boot now and is 
finally fairly well positioned to fulfill its original intention of 
being the "GRand Unified Bootloader". It could be so if it supported 
network booting and really if elilo didnt exist anymore Im sure that 
somebody wouldve contributed the feature by now, most likely from a
cloud team.

>With Best Regards, 
>Keshav
And to you as well,
Jason

Re: [elilo-discuss] Please switch to GIT (or another DVCS) so that it is easy to contribute to ELILO

[Keshav P. A. <the...@gm...>]

On 16 October 2013 01:57, jfly <fle...@us...> wrote:

> Hi Keshav,
>
> thanks for your note.
> >Hi,
> >    Can you guys please switch from CVS to GIT (or another DVCS) so
> >that it is easy for users to track development of ELILO. Currently it
> >is difficult to track using CVS. Thanks in advance.
> GIT is great (and intended) for really large projects with 100's of
> contributors. As elilo is neither of those, and that status wont change,
> I dont see the benefits warrant the time and effort. There is nothing
> that prevents you from pulling the source into your own local git
> repository and working on it within git and sending patches for
> consideration and elilo will stay on sourceforge. That being said, I
> hear you, I work with git for the kernel and Ive thought about switching
> this source over to git now and then. Git is superior to CVS so I'll
> consider it again. you are the first to raise a complaint. no really.


This is the exact same reply you gave at
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=26920372 . Just
because git was designed with Linux Kernel in mind doesn't mean it
shouldn't be used for smaller projects. There are users in github who use
git for managing 10-line scripts and git is working perfectly fine without
any overhead in such cases. It is difficult to visualize commit log and
diff using CVS but that is a breeze with git.

If you are referring to "git cvsimport", it is still not a proper solution
to converting to GIT server-side. Using GIT to manage development is not
going to any more difficult for you compared to using CVS, but using CVS is
definitely difficult for downstream users. I am just asking you to host the
ELILO code in GIT in the sourceforge project instead of CVS. This should be
a one-time change and I suppose sourceforge itself will take care of the
conversion.

I am not bothered about lack of new development in elilo. My interest is
academic and ease of accessing the code. I want to study the code
commit-wise and per-file diffs to understand how the code evolves. This is
much easier in GIT and much difficult in CVS. Even if you completely stop
updating elilo in the future, just leave the code in GIT so that anyone who
wants to restart development can do so easily. If you definitely don't want
to switch to any distributed VCS (can't think of any reason why), at least
switch to SVN. Using SVN is still easier than CVS. At this point, when many
projects are moving from SVN to GIT/HG/BZR etc., I don't understand why you
are refusing to migrate from CVS!



 >Off-note: Is ELILO still under active development? Because there seems
> >to be no update after v3.16 which was released in March 2013 (8 months
> >ago). Even if it is no longer actively maintained, providing the
> >sources via GIT will allow contributors to fork the code and maintain
> >it in github/gitorious/bitbucket etc..
> Elilo is still actively maintained solely by me but no longer in active
> development. Elilo was designed in the early 2000's for EFI and Itanium,
> thats why it exists. As neither of those are very relevant any more It
> is legacy code at the end of its life cycle naturally. Im really not
> accepting new features or new feature requests. New releases are for
> major bug fixes for people that just cant live without elilo and
> thats about it and I have no bugs waiting to release.


Even though Itanium may no longer be relevant, EFI itself is very much in
use today and complete migration to (U)EFI is happening, so ELILO is very
much relevant in that regard.


>
>
New bootloader efforts and contributions should rightfully go to Grub2.
> It is in active development, has many active contributors and is
> accepting new features and it supports UEFI and secure boot now and is
> finally fairly well positioned to fulfill its original intention of
> being the "GRand Unified Bootloader". It could be so if it supported
> network booting and really if elilo didnt exist anymore Im sure that
> somebody wouldve contributed the feature by now, most likely from a
> cloud team.
>
>
I agree that GRUB2 (or Gummiboot/rEFInd/Syslinux etc.) can be used instead
of ELILO, but many people do not like the all-powerful GRUB and like some
simplicity and ELILO with its small codebase and small size fits the bill.

With Best Regards,

Keshav