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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: eigen moving to mercurial
From:       Benoit Jacob <jacob.benoit.1 () gmail ! com>
Date:       2009-05-18 7:02:39
Message-ID: d9f848520905180002u3ebb0df1k46410a30ec0d21c2 () mail ! gmail ! com
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2009/5/18 Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo@kde.org>:
> On Saturday 16 May 2009, Benoit Jacob wrote:
>> [2] Due to an explosion of the number of prospective contributors, we
>> have a urgent need to switch to a DVCS. KDE has always been very
>> generous in granting SVN accounts including to eigen-only
>> contributors, but still there's no way that KDE's SVN can match the
>> flexibility of having our own dvcs.
>
> it's great that you're experiencing an explosion in contributors, and i can
> understand why you'd like to move to a dvcs. it's a little unfortunate imho
> that mercurial will be used, and not because mecurial isn't a good tool (it
> seems like quite a _good_ one, actually) but because of this:
>
> in some of my unhappy dreams, however, we end up in a world where every bit of
> kde related technology uses some different set of management and build tools,
> forcing people to both learn and keep around N different systems for building,
> version control, bug systems, etc.

If all goes according to plan, KDE people should never have to use
Mercurial in order to get the Eigen that they need for KDE:
1) short-term, they keep using /trunk/kdesupport/eigen2
2) long-term, they use their distro's package or simply download the
latest stable source tarball from Eigen's website

The whole point is that after Eigen 2.1 is released, KDE only relies
on a _stable_ version of Eigen. Having to rely on the development
version was caused only by the youth of Eigen.

> there's a general trend towards git usage (Qt's latest moves being perhaps one
> of the largest moves in recent times, but the common use of git-svn amongst
> kde devs is another significant, if less visible, one). now, one can certainly
> argue why git isn't the best, but it's hard to argue that using common tools
> carries significant benefits.

Initially we considered Git first but the git-svn bridge blew up on
KDE's SVN. Specifically, the issue was that we needed to convert
trunk,branches,tags from these locations:

/trunk/kdesupport/eigen2
/branches/eigen
/tags/eigen

and the "greatest common divisor" between these paths is ... the root
"/" and, apparently as a consequence of that, git-svn was miserably
trying to retrieve the history of all of KDE instead of focusing on
the small subdirs we were interested in. At least I can say that it
was taking forever and causing a lot of network traffic. Then someone
(Thomas Capricelli, by the way a KDE guy) who happened to be a
Mercurial expert, offered to do the move for us and frankly there was
no reason not to go for it!

By the way, I also didn't know initially how widely used Mercurial
was, but it turns out it's used by such large projects as Mozilla,
Python, Java(OpenJDK), OpenSolaris, Symbian, Xine... and is the top
candidate for an upcoming migration of OpenOffice.

>
> just a thought. best of luck on the continued success of eigen. :)

Thanks,
Benoit
 
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