[geos-devel] Ready to switch from SVN to GIT ?

[Regina Obe]

Here are my thoughts mostly in-line with strk and speaking from my selfish point of view.


On Thu, Apr 06, 2017 at 06:41:27PM +0200, Mateusz Loskot wrote:
>> 
>> Drone is rather an interesting addition, not something to rely on, from my POV.
>> It does not support builds on Windows. I'm not even sure it supports 
>>  builds on OS X.
>>  (I mean 'guest' OS, not host).

Drone is just one option of many and we don't need to choose just one.

>From my POV, I'm a windows packager and I like to have the packages (test builds) built automatically with each run of PostGIS / pgRouting GEOS / eventually GDAL (though this I just build at the end except on debbie which tests each change).

Github won't do this for me.  This is getting to why I need more control than what github provides and support the Jenkins buildbots.  Those do more than testing, they make builds.
As I recall I think QGIS has similar needs.  I'm not sure how they handle that currently.  And if you are going to make an experimental build, it's kind of part of the process you end up testing what you are building.


> We have Jenkins building GEOS on Windows, that's another research topic.
> There is a Jenkins Gogs plugin which wasn't installed last time I checked.
Yap that's the next step.


>> Tiny projects like GEOS, non-profits like OSGeo simply can not afford 
>> investment in developing its infrastructure at low-level.

> I asked you in particular, and I'll keep asking each developer partecipating in a free software project community. It's something some people enjoy doing, because maybe they think they could use the 
>  investiment they make in the future (effectively using the software or just the skills built improving it).

I think the problem to focus on here, is why we don't have more investment in OSGeo to support this and other things if so many companies are relying on our work.
Should we hit up on Amazon for example, who from what I learned on PostgreSQL conference provides buildbots to PostgreSQL project.  Since PostGIS now is a big selling point for Amazon (and now Google PostgreSQL also supports PostGIS) and PostGIS relies on GEOS and GDAL, sounds like we can get some bite there for first PostGIS then GEOS and GDAL.

Rather than accepting the status quo and saying we're too poor let's just use GitHub. Let's ask how can we be better at marketing and asking for money or infrastructure?
We are too focused on doing software development on a shoe-string budget and not asking enough of WHY DO WE HAVE TO WORK THIS WAY? 

As I already mentioned GitHub doesn't satisfy all my needs.  I'd like to for example test on other OS like FreeBSD, CentOS
And I even have dreams of having pre-compiled builds for these people to increase the number of people testing things out for us.

This is not something I see GitHub or Travis or AppVeyor doing for us.  They are simply for testing not for creating builds that brave users who don't know how to compile
can start using and stress testing.


>> I'll repeat myself, GitHub-based ecosystem is the only cost-effective 
>> solution available for not-so-rich non-profits.

> We don't need to pick one, as you can see.
> We're using all of them: github.com, gitlab.com, git.osgeo.org/gitlab and git.osgeo.org/gogs. Decide where to focus and invest your time !


>  --strk;

I concur with strk.  For my purposes making sure things are ready at time I need to distribute is most important to me.  The more environments we have for testing the better.

Thanks,
Regina