Re: A plea for volunteers (Fwd: CVS support at SourceForge ends Nov. 30)

[Mojca M. <moj...@gm...>]

On 7 October 2017 at 22:22, Hans-Bernhard Bröker wrote:
> Am 07.10.2017 um 20:30 schrieb sfeam via gnuplot-beta:
>
>> So I am making a plea for a  volunteer to step up and transfer the project
>> files
>> to some git repository.
>
> Going all the way to Git might not be optimal for us.  SVN is closer in
> philosophy to CVS.

Each conversion from one technology to another is time consuming and
lossy in some way or another.

CVS is already "stone age" technology and has been deprecated and
inherently broken in my point of view. For ages.

SVN is at least not broken, it's still being actively developed, it
still has its niche use and might be better for particular type of
use(rs). But it's already declining and numerous projects migrate from
subversion to GIT (or Hg). With current instability of sourceforge,
another downtime might again mean inability to continue regular
development for a few weeks (something that already happened in the
past). With Git you can both keep committing locally and/or switch to
a backup server location is seconds. And if someone really hates git,
it's still possible to use the "subversion layer" locally (at least
GitHub offers that functionality).

While there was less incentive to migrate to another technology if
gnuplot was using SVN at this moment, there's little point in
replacing one dead technology with another one that's already in
decline.

To me that's like replacing a 56k modem with 1 Mbit ADSL when you have
optic fiber in your backyard :)

>> I don't really care much where the repository lives, but unless the
>> associated
>> gnuplot web site, bug trackers, mailing lists, etc are also moved it would
>> seem simplest to continue using SourceForge.
>
> I vote to keep it on SourceForge.  They offer both SVN and git, and IMHO it
> makes sense to keep it all in one place.

That's up to mainly Ethan to decide. I'm not a big fan of SourceForge
and prefer any other hosting provider, but if the repo is in git, at
least one can get a nice mirror at GitHub. SourceForge is very
user-unfriendly as far as browsing commit history is concerned.

The only thing that's missing on, say, GitHub, are the mailing lists,
but the existing lists can stay.

Here are some huge advantages of GitHub that I wanted to point out.
- If someone without commit rights creates a pull request, all it
takes is hitting a button to accept the changes (of course once you
have tested them).
- With a pull request, the changes don't get outdated as fast. When I
submitted something to the existing bug tracker, it took 5 years to
accept it. At any given moment inbetween the patch was most likely
outdated and needed to be manually fixed in order to apply cleanly.
With a pull request, git takes care of making sure that the patch can
still be applied even if the files in question change in the meantime.
- It is easy to set up Travis builds, so that gnuplot gets rebuilt on
several machines after each commit and for each pull request. Then you
can immediately see if a submitted patch breaks something.
- You wanted to keep the info about the author of the patch. If you
keep using existing tracker, you'll need to fix that info manually and
many committers would forget to do it. With pull requests, you get the
author info correct automatically.

Of course there are other providers, not only GitHub, many of them
much better than SF.

Mojca