[Koha-devel] Moving to Arch?

[MJ Ray]

In yesterday's IRC, "CVS and Arch" was one of the last things 
discussed and some of the developers had to be in other places by 
then, so I agreed to summarise to the list and start discussion here. 
Please wade in with comments or questions as you see fit. Here we go!


Introduction:

I introduced GNU Arch http://www.gnuarch.org/ which solved the 
problems I had getting 2.0 under control and making tarballs from it. 
The move mostly consisted from making a tarball from CVS, unpacking it 
and then adding the files to an Archive. That's what you can get from 
my development page at http://www.mjr.dsl.pipex.com/

Anyone can make their own copy of the koha2 archive and publish it if 
they have a public file space (web, ftp or sftp for sure). That works 
for mirrors and for development branches. So, new developers have full 
revision control easily, by default, rather than needing hacks or 
write access to the release source tree. A release manager can merge 
their changes into the release tree with a simple command. Apart from 
merging, all operations happen on your own file space, which 
eliminates the wait for a central server to answer that often holds me 
back with CVS.


Suggestion and tasks:

I suggest trying to move to arch for 2.4 development if we can get it 
working for current developers, because it should make the lives of 
the release managers and new developers a lot easier. I've offered to 
answer questions and improve my tutorial until it's good enough.

Some commented about having large amounts of CVS experience, but there 
didn't really any great love for CVS, more a feeling of "better the 
devil we know". The sticking points are likely to be users of GUI 
interfaces and Microsoft Windows, so I'd be very happy about offers to 
help with those.

No other public archives for 2.0 were posted, which I think is a 
shame, but I guess 2.2 has all the appeal for developers now. A couple 
of people mentioned that they would like 2.0 commit messages to 
koha-cvs, so I'll try to set that up.

There was a suggestion of compiling a list of benefits and drawbacks 
of each system, but I think that's probably already covered by 
http://wiki.gnuarch.org/moin.cgi/SubVersionAndCvsComparison or could 
be (it's a wiki).

Finally, what would happen to the CVS? I'd leave it as a historical 
record, with some clear marking that development has moved on. You can 
transfer some of the history to Arch, but it's an attempt to 
reconstruct information that isn't really kept by CVS, so it seems 
more trouble than its worth.


--
MJR/slef    My Opinion Only and not of any group I know
 Creative copyleft computing - http://www.ttllp.co.uk/
http://www.thewalks.co.uk stand 13,Lynn Carnival,12 Sep