Re: Moving from SVN to git - finally!

Well, I got you, but it is obvious that the work for maintainers has only increased after this migration. They need to *manually* at least:

- have local docs repository and keep it up to date

- to merge PR them need to create a patch based on changes from PR and apply it locally

- to actualize the docs according new changes in English, them need to _somehow_ find outdated files (and find out commit hash)

- do not forget to regularly check for new PRs (patches) in doc repo

Previously, all this could be done from one place -- the online editor. This is actually a good tool as it makes life a lot easier for maintainers/translators.

It seems to me that it is worth paying special attention to the maintainer experience, or at least making it the same as before. Therefore, yes, having online editor working with git would be very helpful!

BTW the docs repos look like a black box anyway:

- Disabled issues and discussions

- No contributors guidelines or something else

- After creating PR it is not clear who can be mentioned to request review or just ping to quickly accept PR (or get help)

If you think these are just complaints, all right, I will no longer share my opinions and feedback with you.

30.12.2020, 19:48, "G. P. B." <[email protected]>:

On Wed, 30 Dec 2020 at 17:25, Mikhail Miroshenko <[email protected] > wrote:

> How is the workflow for maintainers different than before?

Oh no, as far as I know, earlier maintainers did not need to do actions locally -- just the online doc editor and here we go! Currently, each of the maintainers needs to have own local repository and manually apply third-party patch from a PR. This is hellish pain!

BTW what about actualizing a translated doc files? In the online editor we could see which files were outdated and needed in translation update. Currently, maintainers need to find out this manually.

Offtop -- oh, it seems to me that you have "buried" the translations of docs with current migration, because it is much more difficult and unpleasant to handle this.

I have been a maintainer for a long time and the online editor is the best tool for me as regular translator!

I am very sad that you have essentially removed all the tools that simplify (translation) work. Even using the GitHub interface is impossible to merge a PR... so what was the point then? It's just a Git mirror, nothing more, imo.

> The idea would be to have the maintainers added to the github repo as maintainers. Then you'd be notified of a new PR.

It would be great. Although I actually wrote about it before. That you can use the GitHub's _code owners_ to achieve this.

As someone who extensively used the online doc editor for the French translation I can assure you it has been an utter pain to use the past few weeks as it would randomly not apply some changes and you would need to commit them by downloading the patch and applying it yourself *anyway*.

Moreover, it has been relatively slow as a tool but the only reason I used it was for the diffs it generated.

Something that was always available via the revcheck available on http://doc.php.net .

Yes the revcheck script needs to be redone to accustom the git hashes.

Yes it is currently suboptimal for users which have a VCS account.

But for anyone new wanting to contribute the online doc editor is IMHO useless, it's impossible to review patches on it, and if they stay there for ages they become out of sync as it doesn't do a diff compared to the HEAD, people also just left stuff in the W.I.P. section instead of making a patch.

And there is no way to ping someone on it. All of these issues make a GH mirror a way better user experience.

Moreover, it's impossible to collaborate on a large change as providing partial commits is pretty gross.

About not being able to directly merge from GH, I must say welcome to the PHP project, all git repos have working like this, and we go through this process for merging patches from GitHub into php-src, and it truly isn't as painful as you make it out.

There is a one command which will handle it for you:

curl http://url_of_github_patch.patch | git am

git commit --am // Add Closes GH-prnum

git push origin

If you truly want, you don't even need to edit the commit message to close the PR automatically, you'll just need to do it manually.

So *please* before complaining about the new process, try it out.

Best regards,

George P. Banyard