Re: GPE bugtracker and SCM

Hello Florian,

      Sorry for not following up to this earlier, but I felt a bit
perplexed to participate in the fiery discussion that ensued. Personally,
I can understand both your, active maintainers', point fo view, and
George's and his team, who were at the origins of all that and have
been providing constant support since then. Well, I'm new kid on the
block, and don't think that I have weighty opinion on this point. But
I guess, orginizational and administrative issues are being resolved,
to come to a reasonable solution whatever it will be.


     Here, I would like to indeed constrain discussion to techinal
aspects only: whatever the home GPE will have, how to improve it, to
ease maintenance burden, and streamline user/developer support.

Friday, August 18, 2006, 1:42:55 PM, you wrote:

> Hi all,

> now that Paul asked - what do you guys think about the technical aspects?

>> Hmm.. what makes you think LTG doesn't offer SVN? But right, SVN is something we
>> should think about. I missed a way to move directories and files around several
>> times.

   Yes, I missed this - had looked at couple of its first projects,
saw CVS only and got this impression. I'm glad it is already there.


> I'm personally not adverse to SVN, it would make some things we face with the
> GPE tree much easier - e.g. we could sort the modules more easily. Currently
> more or less everything is in the base subdir. Subversion should be quite stable
> and is quite similar to CVS from the users point of view.

> But i'd like to have some more opinions about this - are there important reasons
> not to use SVN?

  I hope, even more "hardcore" options like Monotone/GIT/whatever are
not considered ;-). SVN should be indeed good compromise between
advanced features and ease to learn, already experienced user base,
and ease of maintenance. SVN would improve work process for different
participant roles - core developers, contributors, occasional patch
submitters, just users. As a note, it would be nice to have SVN via
HTTP/WebDAV (vs SSH), as that would help people behind heavy
firewalls (so far I see LTG offers svn/svn+ssh protocols).

> A similar situation we have with the bugtracker, something we should have set up
> quite some time ago. We have several choices - all with advantages and
> disadvantages.

> - Bugzilla:
>   Well known to developers and users. It would allow to trade bugs from
> distributions to upstream development.

  Via export/import? We'd yet need to see this actually used. Though
yes, it's pretty much standard in Embedded Linux circles ;-).

> - GForge bugtracker:
>   Good integration with GForge but just another tracker people need to learn to use.

    GForge tracker is similar to SourceForge.net's, and I guess many
users might try it already. AFAI can see, it's pretty basic, for good,
or bad. One thing which is good with GForge tracker is that it is
consistent for all projects - once people know how to use it (and
for users, submit is pretty easy), they can use it in any hosted
project.

> - Trac or CVSTrac bugtracker:
>   Good integration with SCM and quite easy to use.

    But now that you mention Trac, I can only passionately second this
choice. For development, Trac+SVN combo just screams. Maybe its just
me, but Trac offers just the best SCM viewer - it's always easy to
find what you're looking for, and it shows result just the very
natural and comfortable way (ViewVC (ex-ViewCVS) is second in its
usability IMHO, and current Mtn/GIT viewer are just bare). It has
pretty good tracker and wiki. And all this can be easily cross-linked
via easy wiki syntax. Summing up, it would let developers to do their
job comfortably, being able to easily maintain and visualize project
history, and let contributors/users to has good insight into the
latter, lowering participation threshold and alleviating support burden.

> I suppose we have some opinions :-)

> Greetings

> Florian




-- 
Best regards,
 Paul                            mailto:[email protected]