Re: VCS for squid3 development?

On Sat, 2007-12-29 at 02:12 +0100, Henrik Nordström wrote:
> lör 2007-12-29 klockan 05:24 +1100 skrev Robert Collins:
> > Other projects using distributed VCS tools often do not have a dedicated
> > development area, preferring to let individuals publish their own
> > branches; I had been assuming something like that - but its a good
> > question to raise and discuss.
>
> We need both.
>
> Our turnover on contributions is rather long, often with multiple
> authors over some years, and not having them collected i a central
> repository means a very high risk of the contribution getting lost.
>
> Also many of the contributors do not really have a suitable place where
> they can host public access to their repository.
>
> But it's a quite separate problem from the migration of the main
> repository.

Some options:

Existing hosting site
Setup own hosting site
Use a patch tracker rather than branch hosting

Existing hosting sites for bzr:
 - launchpad
   + no charge for use, provides web viewer etc etc etc
   - no 'repository' support - so each branch needs a full upload of the
     history when creating it. (This will be getting addressed during
     2008)
   - no custom website facility like sourceforge (but we could query lp
     and do a dynamic page on squid-cache.org easily. And the directory
     facility we use sourceforge's custom website stuff for is builtin
     to launchpad anyhow)

Setup own hosting site
 - more time and effort from our volunteer pool
 - need to do account management stuff which will raise the bar for
   adding contributors
 + complete control
 + could do a shared repository to make initial uploads of branches fast

Use a patch tracker
 See for example http://bundlebuggy.aaronbentley.com/
 + patches are very small - just the size of the aggregate work, no VCS
   metadata is lost - they can be merged from and pulled from just like
   branches
 + self manages the list of 'active patches'
 + good for review
 - may be more tricky to explain than just using branches

I'd suggest use a patch tracker with launchpad as a hosting site for
folk that want or need external branch hosting.

-Rob

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