Re: [Savannah-hackers-public] Allowing git repos to automatically push to gnu.org/software/$PROJECT

[Bob Proulx]

Hello Daniel,

I will apologize to everyone here for being mostly absent from the
mailing lists the past few months.  I have been overbooked and needed
to shed load and keeping up with the mailing lists was part of the
load that got shed.  Sorry.

Karl Berry wrote:
> Project maintainers on savannah cannot create their own git repos.  They
> have send email/submit a support request.  (This is a constant thorn in
> everyone's side.)

Yes.  It would be super awesome if the web UI had an interface for
project maintainers to create sub project git repositories.  The only
reason this hasn't been a serious problem is that there really are not
that many requests for this.  And once they get created then there is
no more maintenance needed.

> I guess your proposal is intended to avoid any work being necessary on
> the Savannah side. I can understand that goal.

Yes.  But...  I think it is starting from the wrong end of things.
Certainly checking out web pages with git is the easy part of the
problem.  And if that were the only problem then one might consider
that it would already have been done at some point.  Instead the hard
part of the problem is to modify the web UI and the associated
database tables to handle project maintainers selecting their version
control system choice for web pages.  That's the bit of work that is
needed to make this happen.

> All that said, let me just say that the interface that seems cleanest to
> me would be to change new.py to take an additional option to specify the
> web repository VC type, say "-R cvs" or "-R git".

Very small note.  For curl it would probably be a form entry option as
is currently used for the other options.  So probably "-F vcs=git" or
"-F vcs=git" or "-F vcs=svn" or default to "-F vcs=cvs" or some such
to pass through.

> Then, on the savannah side, git would have to be supported as a backend
> for web repos as well as cvs (database work, UI work). On the fsf side,
> it would be a matter of running git commands instead of cvs commands,
> but following exactly the same pattern.

There are only three magic numbers: Zero, One, and Many.  Currently
there is support for One.  To change that then we need to support
Many.  Therefore some web UI work will be needed to allow project
maintainers to select their web backend system of choice.  Because in
yesteryear it was cvs.  Right now it is git.  But svn and hg people
feel just as strongly about their vcs of choice.

As it turns out I am out on holiday away from my house and the
networking here has just turned from pretty bad to really terrible.
I will have to leave this here and send it off and hope that it
transmits.

Bob

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