Friendly talk

[Rainer Müller]

On 2013-09-03 16:19, Blair Zajac wrote:
> On 09/03/2013 02:23 AM, Guido Soranzio wrote:
>> On Aug 29,David Strubbe-2 wrote:
>>
>>> What the advantages and disadvantages does Homebrew have with respect
>>> to MacPorts?
>>
>>
>> If you are very passionate about Cocoa and dynamic languages, I think you
>> can’t ignore Ruby and GitHub.
>>
>> There’s a very vibrant community growing around the CocoaPods, a new
>> package manager written in Ruby which allows to integrate hundreds of
>> open source libraries and components in you Xcode projects.
>>
>> Forking and sharing you personal work is very easy in Homebrew and
>> CocoaPods. You can also “tap” directly other personal repositories
>> before their inclusion in the official trees.
> 
> Moving our source code from svn to github would definitely be a win in
> getting people to contribute and making it easier for us as developers
> to merge their commits into the project.

We had talks about switching to DVCS/git before, I digged up some of the
threads from back then for those you joined the project later [1].

I am opposed to moving to a whole new hosting provider due to the
technical implications on the infrastructure. Our database of issues in
Trac is quite large and I don't think it could easily be transferred to
Github or anywhere else. Splitting the code hosting and the issue
tracker between different hosting providers would be difficult and leads
to practical problems. You would need to match account names somehow and
the advantage of pull requests tied to issues would be gone.

If we really want to have a different review interface for submissions,
I would dream of a system where one can automatically see feedback from
'port lint' and the buildbots for each submission. Just a dream... :-)

A different approach could be to have a completely separate overlay on
another hosting provider as submission branch for new and experimental
ports. For example, this is the way the Gentoo Sunrise Project [2]
handles new submissions. However, at a specific point you would need to
move it over to the tree of supported ports. Making that decision may
not be easy due to the amount of unmaintained ports we already have.

Rainer

[1] http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-dev/2009-May/008764.html
    http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-dev/2009-November/010704.html
    http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-dev/2011-January/013699.html
[2] https://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/sunrise/