[Bf-committers] introduction

[Ian Watkins]

On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 11:59 AM, Nathan Letwory
<nathan at letworyinteractive.com> wrote:
> On 3.6.2010 18:46, Michael McLay wrote:
>> On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 10:29 AM, Nathan Letwory<
>> nathan at letworyinteractive.com>  wrote:
>>
>>
>>> On 3.6.2010 17:13, Ian Watkins wrote:>  Lastly, have you guys used git at
>>> all?  With the many branches you've
>>>
>>>> made for SOC, and the commit policy, I'd think you guys would love
>>>> distributed source code management -- along with the ability to merge
>>>> less painfully.
>>>>
>>>>
>>> No. I try to sync trunk to gitorious.org/blenderprojects though. And I
>>> don't think that a change of SCM will be done anytime soon. SVN has
>>> served us well enough and after a big CVS->SVN transition I don't think
>>> most of the users are longing for yet another one. Personally I'd like
>>> Git though.
>>>
>>>
>> I hope the Blender team is open to suggestions about how to improve the
>> project management activities. I agree with Ian that moving to a distribute
>> source code management tools has advantages. Merging is one of them. Another
>> is the ability to checkin to a branch when you are offline and then later
>> push the commits to the local copy of the branch back into the branch in a
>> central repository. The choice between Git, Bazaar, or Mercurial is a matter
>> of taste more than a matter of features.
>>
>> A higher level discussion might also reconsider the choice of gforge. I
>> believe there is some disastifaction with gforge and alternatives have been
>> suggested. I don't recall the name. It wasn't Trac. I believe it was written
>> in Ruby. I wasn't reading the Blender mailing list when the decision was
>> made to move to gforge, but I would assume it may have been due to problems
>> with Sourceforge. That is a common reason for ditching Sourceforge. From a
>> project management perspective I would suggest considering a move to
>> Launchpad.net would. There are many advantages in migrating Blender to
>> Launchpad.
>>
>
> I worked on Redmine for a while, but got bogged hugely down by the
> workload at the previous job. Now that I am my own employer I think I'll
> recontinue this work if wanted so.
>
> There has earlier been talk about why not use an existing hosting and
> project management solution, and from the discussions I have gathered
> that it is in the end much more desireable to be in complete control of
> everything, with the risk that some resources go "to waste" by
> maintaining those (I'd say they go to a good cause, but that depends on
> your vantage point).
>
> Currently there's an effort under way to upgrade our ancient gforge
> installation to the latest version. This has been impeded due to
> problems with the servers though, but once those are solved I think that
> we'll see at least an updated and upgraded gforge installation, which
> hopefully alleviates the most pressing problem: the trackers.
>
> I guess we can have the discussion again after the integration (it's
> already in the pipeline, as said).
>
> About launchpad - I think I tried gaining maintainership of the Blender
> project there, but I have had no responses to my queries, so I lost
> interest in it (and after having used both Git and Bazaar I came to
> prefer Git after all, even though I was leaning towards Bazaar in the
> beginning) Anyway, as I already mentioned, I have a git repository
> mirrored on gitorious.org/blenderprojects, and can add users there that
> want write access to some repository, but not be in the so-called core
> team (people with write access to our svn repository).


Further queries:

1) Is there an automated nightly build?  (e.g., BuildBot, hudson, etc)
If not, what would it take to get one set up?  Actually, I think I
could do this myself -- but it would lack the ability to post good
output to a webserver.  I could easily have email sent to this list if
that's acceptable.
2) Is there a code review tool instance?  (i.e., review board,
crucible, reitvald, etc)  If not, can one be set up?


-- 
--Ian