[postgis-devel] is PostGIS ready for git ?

[Mark Cave-Ayland]

On 14/10/15 09:35, Paragon Corporation wrote:

> Ah yes indeed I see Paul put in a pull request
> 
> https://github.com/postgres/postgres/pull/7
> 
> I'm just saying, lets not lose any functionality we've already got in changing and lets not make patch submission a 20 step process like PostgreSQL does.  
> We aren't that big that we need to be so formal about it.  Let's enjoy our teen years while we have them.

I agree that we shouldn't make it as complicated as PostgreSQL to get
patches applied, but then also we should at least attempt to make sure
that patches applied to master have undergone a review and pass the
in-built regression tests before commit. In particular, given that we
don't have SoB tags then an empirical part of the review process is to
check that any code merged into the PostGIS codebase is either original
or doesn't violate the GPLv2 license.

For our purposes, the github pull requests are roughly equivalent to
someone waving a flag and shouting "hey, go look at this patch!" rather
than as a direct pull request. Perhaps we should think about integrating
the buildbots on a "pending" branch that committers can then merge into,
and then once a clean set of builds have passed can be merged and pushed
to master. Otherwise it doesn't really save the developer much work as
he/she would have to manually add the remote, download the code and run
the regression tests before a commit and then push. Is this something
that we can do with github as-is?

I'm mildly hesitant about putting all our eggs in the github basket for
2 reasons: firstly everyone thought sourceforge was a good place to host
their code until they changed their policy re: adverts and orphaned
project binaries - hopefully this will never happen, but it's something
to think about when comparing with osgeo hosting. Secondly I've been
using github quite a lot for GSoC work over the summer and I don't know
whether it's just being based in the UK or the strange hours involved,
but during that time I've experienced several outages of more than
several minutes which is frustrating when you're trying to help a
student upstream patches.


ATB,

Mark.