Re: we now have "lilypond" organization on GitHub

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling]

On 22/09/13 17:21, Phil Holmes wrote:
> IMHO this is solving a problem that doesn't exist.  Using LilyDev (possibly in a
> Virtual Machine) provides git and git-cl.  Git allows a developer to create a
> patch with 2 commands: git commit and git format-patch.  That can be uploaded to
> Rietveld with a single command (possibly 2 commands, depending on what you were
> doing earlier).  When the review is passed, it can be pushed to staging with 4
> simple commands; or mailed to -devel for any active developer without push
> access - these are very rare.
>
> How hard is that?

(1) If you need to install a VM or a custom distro flavour to hack on a project, 
your design setup is very likely to be wrong.  If you really, really need 
contributors to use certain custom packages, you're almost certainly better off 
making custom package repos for the minimal set of dependencies.

(2) If your developers are working on maintaining a custom distro flavour, 
that's a maintenance burden that is very likely a distraction from useful work.

(3) If your developers all converge around a particular install setup, then you 
are missing out on important usability information from other platforms, and the 
risk is that users are failed because developers weren't aware of the needs and 
requirements in cases outside their own setup.

(4) If your submission process involves non-standard software tools that are 
custom written for the project, you're probably doing something wrong (and again 
creating a maintenance burden for your devs).  A distributed VCS should be 
sufficient out of the box.

(5) In the specific case of git-cl, my own experience was that it was an 
absolute pain.  Multiple (custom) commands to be typed; multiple _different_ 
issue numbers to be remembered (Google Code issue number, Riedveld number...), 
problems if they got mixed up ... and at the end of the day, it wasn't my patch 
that was applied -- the system rebased on a new patch using the email associated 
with my Google account, rather than simply applying the patch I'd submitted.

Compare that with GitHub: push patches to my own repo.  Click on "Submit pull 
request."  Type a brief description and click a button ... done.

I found the git-cl experience absolutely inexplicable given that at the time not 
only was GitHub offering the service it did, but similar experiences were 
available via Bitbucket, Launchpad and Gitorious.