Re: Subprojects in Savannah

[Luis Falcon]

Hi Bob
On Thu, 29 Oct 2020 17:49:28 -0600
Bob Proulx <bob@proulx.com> wrote:

> Luis Falcon wrote:
> > The GNU Health project has different components that would need
> > their own repository, releases, bugs...  
> 
> Does Mercurial handle subdirectories in the repository?  If so then
> it would be easy to set up sub-projects in the hg repository as a
> subdirectory.  If this is something that we would simply need to
> experiment with to try then we could try it.

Mercurial has the concept of "subrepository" to create "siblings" repos
withing a main repository, but I think is adding extra complexity,
there are still caveats and is not really what we need.

What I think would be best is to treat each component as a repository,
inside a parent directory.

At filesystem level, it would look something like this

health (directory)
|- hmis (independent repository)
|- thalamus (independent repository)
|- mygnuhealth (independent repository)
|- ghportal (independent repository)

Each repo would have its own changesets

> 
> For releases I assume you mean on download?  Or elsewhere?  Because I
> note that the download directory for GNU health is empty currently.
> But subdirectories are okay there too.

We are not using the "Download" functionality from Savannah. We
directly upload the stable version to ftp.gnu.org/gnu/health
I will look into it, because it might be a nice thing to link and use
in development versions.

For releases I mean each subproject has its own version and
release cycle. This is important for savannah tasks and bugs. I guess
we can use a preffix for each component when creating or updating the
resource, but is suboptimal.
 
Developer assignment would be nice to be done per subproject, but is
not critical. 

As per news, it would be OK to share the same resource. This would not
be a big problem.

> 
>     https://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/health/
> 
> For the Savannah web UI tracker I will defer to Ineiev as I do not
> know very much about the capabilities there.
> 
> And there is always the ability to simply use namespacing to create
> logical sub-projects too.  health-thalamus, health-mygnuhealth, for
> examples.

True. That could be an option too, and probably the easiest. For
mercurial, we could just migrate the directories to each of these newly
repositories. Each will have its own branching model, tasks, ...

Sourceforge has this concept of "Subproject", where we have the main
"GNU Health" project and then we can add as many subprojects as we
need, each of it with its own set of components.

> 
> > This is something we'll been trying to achieve in Savannah for a
> > while. Andrew Engelbrecht suggest me to ask it here.  
> 
> At the moment subprojects are a manual creation.  For example for a
> git project this is documented here.
> 
>     https://savannah.gnu.org/maintenance/Git/
> 
> It is intended for large subprojects where there might be a handful.
> It isn't intended for an open ended number of projects, say for
> example, like Emacs ELPA.
> 
> > So, the GNU Health project has today 4 subprojects:
> > 
> > 1) GNU Health HMIS
> > 2) Thalamus
> > 3) Federation Portal
> > 4) MyGNUHealth
> > 
> > Is that feasible in the current infrastructure?  
> 
> For the Savannah web UI bug tracker we need Ineiev to join the
> conversation as I know very little about it.

Thank you!