[Xcb] A question about XCB's Git repository layout

[Ian Osgood]

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On Jul 25, 2006, at 4:41 PM, Eric Anholt wrote:

> On Wed, 2006-06-07 at 22:27 +0100, Robert Bragg wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> Jamey has asked me to forward this question here so everyone can
>> "fight it out"
>>
>> <quote>
>> Basically I have been trying to put together a jhbuild moduleset for
>> X.org that will pull e.g. libX11 and XCB from their new git
>> repositories.
>>
>> This has gone smoothly for all git repositories except XCBs :-)
>>
>> The reason stems from the facts that git doesn't seem to let you  
>> clone
>> arbitrary subdirectories of a repository, and jhbuild assumes that
>> there will be a autogen.sh at the top of any repository you ask it to
>> check out.
>>
>> To work around this locally I wrote a small patch for jhbuild that
>> lets you optionally specify a particular subdirectory of a repository
>> to find the autogen.sh, and that seems to work nicely for me.
>>
>> I have passed the patch on to James Henstridge, but in his reply  
>> to me
>> he had wondered if the layout of the XCB repository was ideal and if
>> it could be changed. Suggesting that perhaps having separate
>> repositories for each module might make it easier to deal with  
>> actions
>> such as branching/merging. A minor issue I see myself is just that of
>> consistency with other x.org git modules. (Probably a bit early to
>> talk about consistency but e.g. libXrandr and randrproto are in
>> seperate git repositories.)
>>
>> On the other hand I suppose having separate repositories would  
>> require
>> multiple check-in/merge procedures for widespread changes. If the
>> sub-modules are tightly coupled by nature - making such changes  
>> common
>> - I could see an advantage to a single repository. Interestingly if I
>> understood James correctly he was suggesting that the opposite -  
>> being
>> able to merge such widespread changes piecemeal - might be  
>> preferable,
>> so this may all be a game of pros and cons and those with the biggest
>> fists win.
>>
>> I'm just curious to know if this has been considered before and
>> perhaps if there are other reasons to keep it as is or otherwise?
>> </quote>
>>
>> Finally; this was Jamey's initial response to kick things off:
>>
>>> My first reaction is, "That would be painful for us and jhbuild  
>>> shouldn't
>>> assume that anyway," but I'd like advice from others...
>
> I've also been working on the jhbuild setup for xorg, for the  
> purpose of
> getting the tinderbox alive again in some form.  xcb was also a
> stumbling block, and jamesh is still wondering if there's been any
> resolution from xcb folks on whether or not they'd rearrange the repo.
> Since the modules in xcb are presumably going to be releasing
> separately, it does seem to make sense to me that there would be
> repositories split along module lines rather than project lines.
>
> -- 
> Eric Anholt                             anholt at FreeBSD.org
> eric at anholt.net                         eric.anholt at intel.com

Back on June 8, Josh thought that jhbuild should not make assumptions  
about the location of autogen.sh (that is, Robert Bragg should commit  
his patch to jhbuild).

Josh also noted that it is probably time to split the repository in  
any case. Against the disadvantages of having multiple things to pull  
and dependency checking to add, there are the advantages of being  
able to tag and release the repositories separately.

I'm fine either way. There seem to be a zillion freedesktop  
repositories already, who would notice four more? Having 3-5  
repositories to refresh isn't so bad compared to maintaining the  
hundred old protos, libs, and apps.

On the practical side, XCB development has slowed down recently. Who  
will do the work of splitting the repository?

Ian

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