Re: Summary of a IRC conversation in #zynot-infra

On 8/10/03 7:19 AM, "Uwe Reimann" <[email protected]> wrote:

>    1. We need a SVN FAQ. The FAQ basically should point to existing
>       documentation but give a basic intro with examples specific to
>       out trees. Mark Bainter already started a subversion tutorial
>       which has been ported to Tiki by Dave Thacker.
>       http://wiki.zynot.org/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=3DSubversionTutorial


That's a good idea for sure.  I for one am an svn newbie and appreciate thi=
s
greatly.


>    2. We need prereleases right away. In order to give people
>       something to play with we should be able to this right away.
>       However, we didn't progress far enough to make official releases
>       ("Unnamed Linux"). The proposed procedure is to set up the
>       developer section in the repository where each developer can
>       distribute his individual files. An entry in /core/README (to be
>       created) should point the unaware to individual projects
>       (beneath /projects and /developers).


This is a touchy point.  Prereleases of what exactly?  AFAIK the only activ=
e
trees being worked on ATM are PPC, and they are most definitely not ready
for the public.

I think we need to discuss this further.  I for one don't want to see us
just put out a gentoo knockoff, even for our developers release.  I want
something that has been re-QA'd and is known to work, and I strongly feel
that the first 'release' we do is a developers only release that is nothing
more than a bare base system.  This is how we can get more contributions,
give everyone a base and they will add all the things they need into their
trees, etc.


>    3. Subversion repository is up, but only a few seem to know about
>       it. Developers should subscribe to zynot-submit mailing list to
>       see what's going on. (I'm not sure about the status of the
>       infrastructure, especially whether it's possible to mass create
>       user accounts with write permissions the the repository, yet.
>       Mark?)

Zynot-submit?  That's a new one to me ...

I think we really need to unify some of these mailing lists... I'm subbed t=
o
quite a few now and more is only going to confuse matters.  What is zynot
submit's purpose?  (I don=B9t mean to sound gruff, just asking questions here
;)

We really need to set down a procedure for where/when/how things that _all_
developers need to know get announced.  TO date it's felt more like a
"scramble for yourself and figure out whats up").

A quote I saw from IRC "well, if you don't have an email address yet it
means that you haven't been persistent enough in chasing down who you need
to".  This is not the right way to do this (and this may be a bad example a=
s
our email services are not really up yet, but you see where I'm getting at)

>    4. It was proposed to have another subversion repository
>       (additionally to the development and IT repositories) for
>       binaries (stage tarballs for example).

I personally don't like this idea.  We most definitely need a proper
naming/versioning scheme for releases, and a flat filesystem is proper for
this IMHO.  If there's an SVN repo for it all its going to waste massive
amounts of CPU cycles for nothing.  If people are re-releasing the same
tarballs with fixes, they need a revision/name change anyway...

Burying stuff like this is SVN makes things much less accessible, which
leads me to another point not mentioned ....

We need an svn subtree built.  gforest started on one, but in the wake of
the shows going on it wasn't finished, there are still builds missing from
it, any takers to finish this and get it online?  Also posting it to SVN is
probably not a great plan considering it's purpose ;)

>From what I understand we need amir's fixed up svn builds and everything
that goes with them (like the custom db4, etc).  At this point the only way
to get a working SVN is to pull and entire overlayed tree with amir's gento=
o
based tree.  This is not a great idea for users of non x86 trees (like ppc)=
.
Kind of defeats what we are going for here, I don=B9t want to add another 20k=
+
files for portage/porteus to choke on ;)

Also I think we need to get SVN tested fairly solidly (by that I mean with =
a
_lot_ of file and some heavy loads) before we start a proper production env
from it.  I was told by very many people (that I trust in these matters)
that we will kill svn dead under the load we are going to generate with
multiple trees, etc.

Not being able to even properly test it on anything non-x86 is also a
concern for me.  I did manage to get it compiled on ppc (nasty hacking),
I've yet to be able to really put it to the test.  I would be concerned to
commit all my work to something that I may not be able to get it back from
at a later date.

Just my $0.02.  Comments/criticisms welcomed and appreciated :)

Mark (Gerk)