Re: [gentoo-doc] Documentation/website in git?

[Joshua Saddler <nightmorph@gentoo.org>]

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On Thu, 16 Sep 2010 20:46:52 +0400
Peter Volkov <pva@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Hi, guys. While there is some job required to move portage tree
> into git it looks like moving documentation and web-site could be
> done much easier. Are there any plans to move on git? Was anything
> done in this direction? This will simplify translator's job as we
> are planning to use git that makes commits faster and allows us to
> ease workflow.

I've been talking to Robin (robbat2) off and on about moving to git
for more than a year now. From what he tells me, it's a simple thing
to switch our website and docs over to git, on the infrastructure
side at least.

There aren't too many changes to make to the docs scripts that gorg
runs, and there's no difference in server load or required storage.

However, we would need to completely rethink our workflow. I jotted
down some notes many months ago; I still have some of 'em:

- Bugzilla changes for drafts and patches? How much would still be
  posted there when we could just have people send pull requests to
  their git clones of our master?
- What about branching? Needed for what we do? What about the
  handbooks? (We used to always do something like that for the
  networkless handbooks, which is partly why we no longer keep
  versioned handbooks around.)
- Reverting commits should be simpler. CVS sucks for reverting
  mistakes.
- Internal doc formatting: should we abandon the <version> scheme,
  since we can just use git commit hashes? It would reduce the manual
  bumping we do (and forget to do). How would that work with git
  history?
- Speaking of history: we'd need a way to carry over CVS history to
  Git history; we absolutely CANNOT lose the merge/update history, or
  all the docs that are in and out of the CVS "attic." Often enough
  we get bugs asking for additions or changes, but it's been settled
  and explained in previous commits and CVS logs.
- Cloning and initial checkouts could be quite nice for translators
  and English devs alike; merging branches and managing contributors
  would be much more flexible and fine-grained. We could host all
  clones on gentoo's git, or even if we continue to have multiple
  separate repos, git makes it easy to pull and merge those changes
  regardless of location.
- What else would translators need?

Git access will ultimately require "gitolite" to be ready. Gitolite
is a perl-based replacement for gitosis-gentoo, which serves up all
our git trees ATM.

I wouldn't mind moving to git, but I already have some limited
experience using it for a year or so. Not all of our contributors are
familiar with it, and even I need to learn more about how git works,
since it's so different from CVS. I imagine we might have some
holdouts who don't want to move from CVS at all, so now's the time to
speak up. What does the rest of the GDP think about moving to git?

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