Re: DVCS

["Kalle Vahlman" <kalle vahlman gmail com>]

2008/10/28 Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>:
> On Tue, 2008-10-28 at 18:55 +0100, Mikael Hallendal wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I can't really see us coming to a consensus on this topic. Even after
>> a vote we would have people continuing to use Bazaar if Git win and
>> vice verse. GNOME is by nature a distributed project with a lot of sub
>> modules, maintainers and thus preferences.
>>
>> I personally think our time and energy would be better spent on
>> finding ways to manage GNOME development with this diversity of
>> version control system (and public repositories).
>>
>> Translations is often brought up as a tricky part for this, can we
>> handle them in a way where they are agnostic to the VCS system the
>> modules happen to be in. I know back in the days when we had Planner
>> on Codefactory servers it was a pain as the translation "system" we
>> used required the translators to commit directly into the CVS/SVN
>> modules.
>>
>> Can we come up with a better way of handling this?
>
> I think the question is "how big do we want to the barrier to entry to
> be?". How many version control systems do you have to learn to
> contribute to GNOME?

It's not only a question of entry barrier anymore though. The SCM
tools have advanced beyond what SVN can offer, it's only natural that
developers adapt these new (and usually bettter!) ways of working.
Once they get the taste of the "good stuff", the motivation to use the
old (and now clunky-looking) system goes way down.

The other, IMO equally important question is how long are the active
contributors and developers willing to keep using an inferior tool
just in the name of giving less-technical people a better chance to
contribute? Or will they (as it looks to be already) flock in to
multiple directions where they can use tools *they* feel are up to the
task.

After all, it's not good if the only thing contributed to the projects
in GNOME SVN is new translations after all the coders quit using it...

-- 
Kalle Vahlman, zuh iki fi
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