[Tcllib-devel] Regarding SourceForge, the Tcllib CVS, and transitioning somewhere.

[Andreas K. <and...@ac...>]

Hi all you developers of Tcllib, Tklib, BWidget, etc. ..

You might have noted that the SourceForge CVS was down for two weeks,
after a hack attack on them.

This downtime ended last week, allowing us, in principle, to continue 
development and re-start commits.

There is however a fly in the soup. Quoting from Jeff's mail to tcl-core

	In the interim, SF also let us know that cvs is now considered
	a legacy service.

In other words, the end-of-life of CVS repositories on SF, and maybe in general 
is on the radar now, and it behooves us, IMHO, to do the transition to 
something else _now_.

As such I ask everyone to hold back from commiting anything to any of the 
projects under tcllib (1) until we have this issue resolved.


While SourceForge apparently will offer a migration service from CVS to SVN I 
agree with Jeff that we should transition to a proper DVCS instead.

Related to the choicce of DVCS is also the issue of hosting, i.e. depending on 
what our choice of system we have less or more options for hosting.

Following the discussions on the chat, about the same issue, only for core 
Tcl/Tk the main contenders are

	our own Richard Hipp's "fossil" 	(2),
	and the ubiquitous 800lb gorilla "git"	(3)

 From a technical point of view both will do the job, and are pretty much 
equivalent. Conversion to either should be relatively trivial via "cvs2git" 
(4), both support the fast-export file-format generated by the converter.

Non-technical arguments for either are

*	fossil is small, clean, simple, easy to learn, with the developer part
	of the Tcl community, and known to be responsive. Pretty much on call.

*	git, while not small, and with a steep learning curve, however is
	*ubiquitous*, with a much larger community. Students learn it.
	Using it means that a GSoC student (for example), can simply be
	pointed to the git repository and told to branch.

*	On the hosting front, using git give us lots of alternatives as:

		SourceForge, github, gitorious(sp?), assembla

*	For fossil we either have to either use the pretty much unknown

		chiselapp

	or self-host. The latter might actually not be to onerous, given that
	fossil comes with a builtin web server. Just needs a box.

*	Richard has its own comparison and reasons for either at
	http://www.fossil-scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/fossil-v-git.wiki


Do I have my own preference ? Yes. And I sincerely hope that I managed to keep 
it out of the arguments above.


One last issue. As (1) shows, we have lots of subprojects. Seven. While these 
are all handled by a single CVS repository directory hierarchy, when going to 
DVCS we should really split them up, each as their own XXX repository. One of 
them, tclbench, should possibly even migrate out of the tcllib more to the core 
itself, given that it is the core whose performance this project is testing.

Discussion is open.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(1) Which are
	bwidget
	mclistbox
	tclapps
	tclbench
	tcllib	(sic)
	tklib
	widget

(2)	http://www.fossil-scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki
(3)	http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git.html

(4)	In contrast to Tcl/Tk core tcllib does not have vendor branches in the
	history AFAIK.

-- 
Andreas Kupries
Senior Tcl Developer
ActiveState, The Dynamic Language Experts

P: 778.786.1122
F: 778.786.1133
and...@ac...
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