notion-devel

[Notion-devel] Reconsidering sf.net and git submodules

[Arnout E. <no...@bz...>]

Hello,

While I'd much rather work on code (bugs and features) than infrastructure,
I'm hearing an increasing frustration with sourceforge.net .

I'd like to hear what you all would think about moving notion to, for
example, github.

On a slightly related note, I've been less than happy with our experiment
using git submodules. Right now we're using relative paths, which means
when you want to fork notion (for example to your own github account) you
need to fork all submodules, too.

We could switch to using absolute URL's, but that has even more
disadvantages: since the notion repo's are available both through
authenticated and anonymous(readonly) URL's, the submodules would have to
point to the anonymous(readonly) URL's. Having to update the parent project
when you're updating a submodule is already a pain, this would make it even
worse. Also, if you'd like to make changes to both the parent and a
submodule in a fork (for example on your own github), you'd need to update
the submodule URL, which counts as a commit and makes merging that parent
branch into mainline notion an absolute pain.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on:
* moving from sf.net to github
* putting everything (including libtu/libextl) in one git repo instead of
using submodules


Kind regards,

Arnout

Re: [Notion-devel] Reconsidering sf.net and git submodules

[Josef 'J. S. <je...@jo...>]

On Sat, Aug 24, 2013 at 02:00:46PM +0200, Arnout Engelen wrote:
> Hello,

I don't develop notion so take my opinions with a large grain of salt.  Ok?
Good.

> While I'd much rather work on code (bugs and features) than infrastructure,
> I'm hearing an increasing frustration with sourceforge.net .
> 
> I'd like to hear what you all would think about moving notion to, for
> example, github.

sf is pretty frustrating.  It used to be the only way reasonable way to run
an open source project (short of running your own server), but that's no
longer true.

Let me ask you this: what features from sf/github/whatever do you want?
Obviously, the repos need to be hosted.  Do you want a mailing list?  A bug
tracker?  Anything else?

FWIW, I dislike github.  Not a day goes by when you can't pull from github
because of technical issues at their end.  Their web UI for repository
browsing outright sucks - it used to be bad, but they changed it and made it
worse.

> On a slightly related note, I've been less than happy with our experiment
> using git submodules. Right now we're using relative paths, which means
> when you want to fork notion (for example to your own github account) you
> need to fork all submodules, too.

I've only used submodules at work for some of our proprietary code... I
think the biggest issue we've ran into was lack of understanding how to use
submodules correctly.  This made them extremely frustrating and essentially
unusable.

As far as notion's use of submodules is concerned... does anyone outside of
notion care about libtu and friends?  If not, just make them part of the
notion repo.

Jeff.

-- 
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Re: [Notion-devel] Reconsidering sf.net and git submodules

[Olof J. <ol...@et...>]

On 2013-08-24 09:54 -0400, Josef 'Jeff' Sipek wrote:
> I don't develop notion so take my opinions with a large grain of salt.  Ok?
> Good.

Same disclaimer goes for me. :-)

> Let me ask you this: what features from sf/github/whatever do you want?
> Obviously, the repos need to be hosted.  Do you want a mailing list?  A bug
> tracker?  Anything else?

Github's bug tracker is a bit lightweight (perhaps enough for
notion?), but I'm really not a big fan of SF's bugtracker. Mailing
lists are not included in Github's service, but that could remain on
sf if no other alternative is available.

> FWIW, I dislike github.  Not a day goes by when you can't pull from github
> because of technical issues at their end.  Their web UI for repository
> browsing outright sucks - it used to be bad, but they changed it and made it
> worse.

I find Github to be a reliable service. Of course there are outages,
but from my experiences, they are as rare (or common) as other similar
services. And fwiw, I don't dislike the file browser. :-)

The biggest advantage of using Github specifically would be the ease
of which a new or sporadic contributor could send patches via pull
requests. The workflow is well known, with the large popularity of
Github. This has downsides as well of course, having an "enforced"
workflow that may not always fit a specific project's needs.

All in all, I'd be happy with a migration to Github, as a user and
sporadic contributor. But in the end, the people actively working with
maintaining notion should decide what fits them best.

> As far as notion's use of submodules is concerned... does anyone outside of
> notion care about libtu and friends?  If not, just make them part of the
> notion repo.

+1

-- 
 --------------------------------------------------------------- 
| Olof Johansson                              http://stdlib.se/ |
|  irc: zibri                           https://github.com/olof |
 --------------------------------------------------------------- 

Re: [Notion-devel] Reconsidering sf.net and git submodules

[Dima K. <no...@di...>]

Josef 'Jeff' Sipek <je...@jo...> writes:

> On Sat, Aug 24, 2013 at 02:00:46PM +0200, Arnout Engelen wrote:
>> Hello,
>
> I don't develop notion so take my opinions with a large grain of salt.  Ok?
> Good.

Likewise.


>> While I'd much rather work on code (bugs and features) than infrastructure,
>> I'm hearing an increasing frustration with sourceforge.net .
>> 
>> I'd like to hear what you all would think about moving notion to, for
>> example, github.

I'm using github right now, but I'm not entirely happy with it. They
keep changing the way their website looks, and with every iteration it
feels less and less like "just a git host". Maybe this is seen as a plus
by some. Also they don't have mailing lists. A useful comparison table
is here:

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open-source_software_hosting_facilities

At some point I'm going to move all my projects to Savannah.


>> On a slightly related note, I've been less than happy with our experiment
>> using git submodules. Right now we're using relative paths, which means
>> when you want to fork notion (for example to your own github account) you
>> need to fork all submodules, too.
>
> I've only used submodules at work for some of our proprietary code... I
> think the biggest issue we've ran into was lack of understanding how to use
> submodules correctly.  This made them extremely frustrating and essentially
> unusable.


I'd like to add that in general, submodules create more work for
maintainers of distribution packages. At least Debian has no
infrastructure for dealing with them at this moment.


> As far as notion's use of submodules is concerned... does anyone outside of
> notion care about libtu and friends?  If not, just make them part of the
> notion repo.

Agreed. Project submodules lie somewhere between being a separate
project and being a part of the main project. I don't think this middle
ground needs to exist. If libtu needs to be usable by others, it should
be spun off as a separate project.

dima

Re: [Notion-devel] Reconsidering sf.net and git submodules

[Philipp H. <ph...@ph...>]

Hey all,

unfortunately I do not find a lot of time (if not to say any) for
developing Notion at the moment, but let me still tell you what I
think:

Concerning submodules: I've never seen any advantage in having them
and would be very much in favor of maintaining a single git repo with
ordinary subfolders.

Concerning SF: The only part that really bothers me is the bug
tracker. But apparently they have made some changes to it so maybe the
worst parts have improved? Essential features I am missing include:
* Inline formatting of code
* a pretty view of attached patches
* the ability to delete spam
I'm not really familiar with github's bug tracker so I don't know if
it has the above features. How would we deal with the lack of a
mailing list on github? And where would we host the web page?

Cheers,
Philipp

2013/8/30 Dima Kogan <no...@di...>:
> Josef 'Jeff' Sipek <je...@jo...> writes:
>
>> On Sat, Aug 24, 2013 at 02:00:46PM +0200, Arnout Engelen wrote:
>>> Hello,
>>
>> I don't develop notion so take my opinions with a large grain of salt.  Ok?
>> Good.
>
> Likewise.
>
>
>>> While I'd much rather work on code (bugs and features) than infrastructure,
>>> I'm hearing an increasing frustration with sourceforge.net .
>>>
>>> I'd like to hear what you all would think about moving notion to, for
>>> example, github.
>
> I'm using github right now, but I'm not entirely happy with it. They
> keep changing the way their website looks, and with every iteration it
> feels less and less like "just a git host". Maybe this is seen as a plus
> by some. Also they don't have mailing lists. A useful comparison table
> is here:
>
>  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open-source_software_hosting_facilities
>
> At some point I'm going to move all my projects to Savannah.
>
>
>>> On a slightly related note, I've been less than happy with our experiment
>>> using git submodules. Right now we're using relative paths, which means
>>> when you want to fork notion (for example to your own github account) you
>>> need to fork all submodules, too.
>>
>> I've only used submodules at work for some of our proprietary code... I
>> think the biggest issue we've ran into was lack of understanding how to use
>> submodules correctly.  This made them extremely frustrating and essentially
>> unusable.
>
>
> I'd like to add that in general, submodules create more work for
> maintainers of distribution packages. At least Debian has no
> infrastructure for dealing with them at this moment.
>
>
>> As far as notion's use of submodules is concerned... does anyone outside of
>> notion care about libtu and friends?  If not, just make them part of the
>> notion repo.
>
> Agreed. Project submodules lie somewhere between being a separate
> project and being a part of the main project. I don't think this middle
> ground needs to exist. If libtu needs to be usable by others, it should
> be spun off as a separate project.
>
> dima
>
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> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/notion-devel

Re: [Notion-devel] Reconsidering sf.net and git submodules

[<eb...@dr...>]

Hi all,

I think that having libraries in one big repository instead of
submodules may be better. The situation was that they had separate
repositories, thus making them submodules was good way to go (but
maybe not the best way). If there will be any use of libtu and libextl
outside notion, and if we will have them as part of one big repository,
we can always "port" fixes and features by good old diff + patch to
their respective repositories. This might be less pain than
not having libtu and libextl in notion repository (No matter if they
will be submodules or repositories without any commit relation.).

I think that submodule repo can be moved to other hosting, the url of
the submodule repo should be only a hint from where to download it. The
'commit' in main repo contains sha1 hash of submodule commit, and this
is independent of submodule location. Thus migration should be easy.
See:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/913701/changing-remote-repository-for-a-git-submodule


On Sat, 5 Oct 2013 20:34:14 +0200
Philipp Hartwig <ph...@ph...> wrote:
> Hey all,
> 
> unfortunately I do not find a lot of time (if not to say any) for
> developing Notion at the moment, but let me still tell you what I
> think:
> 
> Concerning submodules: I've never seen any advantage in having them
> and would be very much in favor of maintaining a single git repo with
> ordinary subfolders.
> 
> Concerning SF: The only part that really bothers me is the bug
> tracker. But apparently they have made some changes to it so maybe the
> worst parts have improved? Essential features I am missing include:
> * Inline formatting of code
> * a pretty view of attached patches
> * the ability to delete spam
> I'm not really familiar with github's bug tracker so I don't know if
> it has the above features. How would we deal with the lack of a
> mailing list on github? And where would we host the web page?
> 
> Cheers,
> Philipp
> 
> 2013/8/30 Dima Kogan <no...@di...>:
> > Josef 'Jeff' Sipek <je...@jo...> writes:
> >
> >> On Sat, Aug 24, 2013 at 02:00:46PM +0200, Arnout Engelen wrote:
> >>> Hello,
> >>
> >> I don't develop notion so take my opinions with a large grain of
> >> salt.  Ok? Good.
> >
> > Likewise.
> >
> >
> >>> While I'd much rather work on code (bugs and features) than
> >>> infrastructure, I'm hearing an increasing frustration with
> >>> sourceforge.net .
> >>>
> >>> I'd like to hear what you all would think about moving notion to,
> >>> for example, github.
> >
> > I'm using github right now, but I'm not entirely happy with it. They
> > keep changing the way their website looks, and with every iteration
> > it feels less and less like "just a git host". Maybe this is seen
> > as a plus by some. Also they don't have mailing lists. A useful
> > comparison table is here:
> >
> >  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open-source_software_hosting_facilities
> >
> > At some point I'm going to move all my projects to Savannah.
> >
> >
> >>> On a slightly related note, I've been less than happy with our
> >>> experiment using git submodules. Right now we're using relative
> >>> paths, which means when you want to fork notion (for example to
> >>> your own github account) you need to fork all submodules, too.
> >>
> >> I've only used submodules at work for some of our proprietary
> >> code... I think the biggest issue we've ran into was lack of
> >> understanding how to use submodules correctly.  This made them
> >> extremely frustrating and essentially unusable.
> >
> >
> > I'd like to add that in general, submodules create more work for
> > maintainers of distribution packages. At least Debian has no
> > infrastructure for dealing with them at this moment.
> >
> >
> >> As far as notion's use of submodules is concerned... does anyone
> >> outside of notion care about libtu and friends?  If not, just make
> >> them part of the notion repo.
> >
> > Agreed. Project submodules lie somewhere between being a separate
> > project and being a part of the main project. I don't think this
> > middle ground needs to exist. If libtu needs to be usable by
> > others, it should be spun off as a separate project.
> >
> > dima
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > Learn the latest--Visual Studio 2012, SharePoint 2013, SQL 2012,
> > more! Discover the easy way to master current and previous
> > Microsoft technologies and advance your career. Get an incredible
> > 1,500+ hours of step-by-step tutorial videos with LearnDevNow.
> > Subscribe today and save!
> > http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=58040911&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk
> > _______________________________________________ Notion-devel
> > mailing list Not...@li...
> > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/notion-devel
> 
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-- 
                                 Tomáš 'ebík' Ebenlendr
                                 PF 2013.76346004566

Re: [Notion-devel] Reconsidering sf.net and git submodules

[Arnout E. <no...@bz...>]

Aah you're right, it's not quite as bad as I thought :). Still I'll
probably make the submodules->folders move at some point.


Thanks for your feedback all,


Kind regards,

Arnout

On Sun, Oct 6, 2013 at 4:14 PM, <eb...@dr...> wrote:

>
> I think that submodule repo can be moved to other hosting, the url of
> the submodule repo should be only a hint from where to download it. The
> 'commit' in main repo contains sha1 hash of submodule commit, and this
> is independent of submodule location. Thus migration should be easy.
> See:
>
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/913701/changing-remote-repository-for-a-git-submodule
>
>