[systemd-devel] [ANNOUNCE] Git development moved to github

[David Herrmann]

Hi

On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 8:12 PM, David Herrmann <dh.herrmann at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi
>
> As of today we've disabled git-push to fd.o. The official development
> git repository is now at github [1]. The old repository will still be
> back-synced, but we had to disable push-access to avoid getting
> out-of-sync with github.
>
> In recent months, keeping up with the mailing-list has become more and
> more cumbersome, with many of us missing mails or unable to keep up
> with the traffic. To make sure all community requests and patches will
> get handled in time, we're now trying out the github infrastructure.
> We encourage everyone in the development community to switch over now,
> even though the old fd.o infrastructure will still be maintained.
> Distributions are free to wait until the next release announcement
> before updating anything.
>
> If github does not work out, we will see what else we can try out. But
> lets give it at least a try.

Short update trying to answer all the questions:

Our preferred way to send future patches is "the github way". This
means sending pull-requests to the github repo. Furthermore, all
feature patches should go through pull-requests and should get
reviewed pre-commit. This applies to everyone. Exceptions are
non-controversial patches like typos and obvious bug-fixes.
The exact 'rules' on when to merge a pull-request need to be figured
out once we get going. Ideas welcome! Until then, just apply common
sense. Push-access can be granted to contributors like before.
However, given that we want a pre-commit review model, it will not
make much of a difference which person eventually merges the patches.
We still highly appreciate the effort spent by many commiters to
review and apply trivial changes up to critical bugfixes. This worked
well and we want to keep this model, but avoid it for any feature
development.

The mailing-list will still be used for non-code related discussions,
and I think (?) patches from new contributors on the ML might still be
handled as before. But I guess this is mostly limited to trivial
patches. Bigger patchsets should really go through github to avoid
them getting lost on mailing-lists.
Regarding the bug-tracker, I honestly don't know what the plan is. I
think the plan is to stick to everything github provides us, to make
sure we don't spread our tools across multiple hosts. However, I
personally would prefer to discuss this in the community and see what
issues come up. Anyone?

The reason behind this move is that our current post-commit model
places a high burden on anyone doing a release. It really does not
scale and requires often more than a month to review everything. It is
hard to distribute the workload as the infrastructure doesn't provide
any help here. The result could be seen with the several hiccups
during the 220 release.
Furthermore, we want to avoid miscommunications on bigger feature
patches that might not make it into upstream. With a pre-commit
review, we hope to settle discussions before any code makes it into
git, and save everyone the hassle of reverting patches which maybe
other projects already relied on.

Regarding the final github address: David Strauss kindly offered the
'systemd' user to us. Hence, we hope to move the repository to
github.com/systemd/systemd this week. Sorry for the confusion, I hope
we can settle all this this week.

Finally, please speak up if there are any issues. I will do my best to
address them. We want to tryout github to reduce the burden on the
maintainers, but to also improve the interactions with outside
contributions. Feedback is welcome! And to everyone not happy with
that move, we'd appreciate if you could still give it a try. Lets see
how it works out!

Thanks
David