[Qgis-psc] Motion: move to GIT and Redmine

[Tim Sutton]

Hi PSC. I would like to send this message below to the developer list
and push the idea of GIT & redmine migration. I thought it might be
nice to first poll the psc and see if this idea has majority support
within the PSC (if it does I would amend the email below to indicate
as much). If it doesn't and any PSC member has specific objection to
this proposal can we please discuss here? As such would you please
indicate:

a) are you in favour of a migration to GIT
b) are you happy for me to get the ball rolling by sending out the email below.

Obviously +1 from me on both counts.

Regards

Tim


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Hi Folks

I would like to push more seriously onto the agenda for this hackfest
the idea of moving over 'lock stock and smoking barrel' to GIT. We
discussed it last hackfest and agreed to maintain the status quo (svn
/ git-svn) for the time being. Since Pirmin kindly gave us a tutorial
on GIT in Wroclaw, I have used it almost exclusively since then.
Despite some parts of git being a little more complex that SVN, I find
it easy to use and a huge improvement on SVN. However as time goes by
I am really starting to feel hampered by the git-svn layer and wish we
could move entirely over to GIT. The biggest issue of GIT-SVN is that
unique commit hashes are lost in the SVN layer so it makes it very
difficult to use GIT properly if multiple end points map back to SVN.

I started writing a bit of an essay on why such a move is a good idea
a week or two back [1] so if you are not familiar with the topic you
could start by reading that. There isn't actually that much work to do
to make the move - the trunk/qgis tree is already in github at our
official project area [2] - Gary just basically needs to stop syncing
that repo from his local git-svn checkout and the rest of us need to
use the github repo as the canonical source for QGIS code. Other parts
of the project can be moved over one at a time (documentation,
incoming web client etc) as needed.

Related to this proposal, I would like to raise the idea of moving our
trac project into redmine so that we can maintain a single issue
tracker for plugins, QGIS etc and remove some duplication of effort in
our web infrastructure (but I think it may be better to address this
proposal separately). I have done a test migration of trac to redmine
for a different project and the process went quite well. Redmine also
integrates nicely with GIT so it's easy to browse the code base and
cross reference commits within redmine. Redmine also supports ldap so
migrating users should be no issue. One thing I am not sure about is
the potential loss of cross referencing in our trac instance to commit
messages - perhaps there is someone out there who could comment on
this.

If I am a lone voice in this issue, I'll happilly back away and leave
things be. However I think there are others out there who share my
desire to become a 'pure git' project, and if there is enough support,
I would like to actively start taking steps to make this happen. If
there is enough interest and impetus to do this, it would be nice to
actually do the migration at the hackfest in Lisbon, instead of just
discussing it. As such I have asked Werner to set up a poll on the web
site to guauge opinion over as broad a base of people as possible [3].
The poll asks:

-----------------
How do you feel about QGIS moving away from SVN and over to GIT?

- Great idea! Please do it!
- I don't mind either way.
- I don't use code check outs or even know what the question means.
- Please don't do this!

-------------------

If there is a good majority of 'please do it' votes, are there any
objections to us taking this as a mandate to go ahead and make the
change? We could work on not more than 30% in the 'please don't do
this' category?

I look forward to your inputs.

Regards


[1]http://www.qgis.org/wiki/MovingToGIT
[2]https://github.com/qgis
[3] URL to be determined

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-- 
Tim Sutton - QGIS Project Steering Committee Member (Release  Manager)
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