Re: [Flightgear-devel] FlightGear and GitHub

[Edward d'A. <tru...@gm...>]

On 30 April 2016 at 23:10, David Megginson <dav...@gm...> wrote:
> Thanks for the background, Curt. For me, it's not a question of Git vs SVN
> vs whatever; it's more that GitHub has completely changed the way most
> collaborative software projects work. After a few years of using GitHub in
> FOSS projects, as well as in work projects for the Government of Canada and
> the UN, the ideas of emailing around patches or of asking for commit access
> to a repo feel like a retro 2001-themed open-source party. Nobody works that
> way any more.

Hi David,

I can't be completely certain, but I have a feeling that you are
referring to the FGAddon wiki article section "Aircraft development"
-> "Commit access" [1].  Specifically where I gave the instructions
about emailing patches and the command:

$ svn diff > my_change.patch

I was not very happy with the text in this introductory section, and
had been hoping for more feedback as new aircraft developers and
aircraft authors and/or mentors worked together.  I constructed this
entire article quite quickly, including the complete French
translation and partial German translation [2], as the original was
just a quickly bootstrapped article consisting of a collection of
quite out-of-date quotes [3].  Based on the large diversity of
development scenarios I list in a later section, the "Commit access"
section is now clearly out of date.  I'll shorten this text to
essentially say that you should coordinate with the original aircraft
author or your mentor for the best way to have your changes pushed
into FGAddon, be that by merge request, file transfer, the primitive
patch system, or any other convenient way, depending on the
development scenario.  More feedback on the FGAddon article from the
core group or new potential aircraft developers would be very much
appreciated, as I'm sure I haven't covered all bases yet and it could
use some refinement.

I don't know if you know, but I loosely based a lot of the original
documentation in the FGAddon article on the documentation for my own
project [4].  This SVN managed project was coincidentally started in
2001, hence some of the text is a little dated.  So if you are
referring to that section FGAddon article, then you got the date
pretty much spot on ;)


> Since I started lurking again, there have been so many times I've thought
> "I'll send a pull request for that fix ... oh, right, I can't." :)

If referring to FGAddon, then no, there is no direct merge request
feature.  But if you are using git-svn, then you can push your local
repository into your own remote SourceForge git repository [5] and
then send an email asking the change(s) to be pulled.  For the other
FG git-based repositories on SourceForge, there is a 'merge request'
feature which is a true git merge request, unlike the GitHub 'pull
request' [6].

The philosophy of FGAddon, as I see it, is to enable a quicker route
to granting full commit access.  Being granted commit access to
FGAddon is now easier than with the old fgdata Gitorious repository -
it just requires asking.  With a SVN repository, as every single
change is revertible, a committer can never do any permanent damage.
Though if someone make changes to an actively developed aircraft
without consent or coordination with the original author, there is
likely to be a bit of trouble.  I'm sure Torsten can set you up with
commit access, as I guess you had commit access to the original fgdata
Gitorious repository?

Regards,

Edward


[1]  Permalink:
http://wiki.flightgear.org/index.php?title=FGAddon&oldid=97593#Commit_access
[2]  http://wiki.flightgear.org/Fr/FGAddon and
http://wiki.flightgear.org/De/FGAddon
[3]  Permalink:  http://wiki.flightgear.org/index.php?title=FGAddon&oldid=87128
[4]  The project relax at http://www.nmr-relax.com with the
documentation mainly from:
http://www.nmr-relax.com/manual/relax_development.html
[5]  http://wiki.flightgear.org/FGAddon#Individual_developer_.28git-svn.29
[6]  http://www.wired.com/2012/05/torvalds_github/