Move part of macports infrastructure to GitHub

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Mar 20, 2014, at 02:46, Mojca Miklavec wrote:

> Despite the fact that I kept pushing a couple of other projects to
> switch to a different version control system (mostly from CVS to git),
> MacPorts is one of those projects where the current system (trac with
> nice linking between tickets and commits, subversion, buildbots, email
> accounts, ...) works pretty well and also looks nice. I do miss some
> functionality (like a website with a nice overview of packages with
> their build success, latest few commits etc.), but that isn't
> something that a migration can solve.

Right, that’s something improving the MacPorts web site should solve.


> Subversion actually has a bunch of benefits over git in this
> particular environment. Git is strong in merging, cherry-picking,
> having a large number of branches etc., but I don't see much need for
> that for maintaining Portfiles. The biggest problem with Portfiles is
> that a number of people without commit rights might need to wait for a
> long time before someone picks up their patch and commits it, but
> switching to a different system would still mean that someone would
> need to look at commit and test it before accepting it. The only thing
> that could be different is probably a clearly visible pull request. In
> MacPorts' trac it's not too easy to spot the difference between
> "please commit this, it's fully functional" vs. "I've been just
> playing around and tossing ideas – feel free to look and this patch
> and improve it" vs. plain requests to fix things. And if a random
> developer just happens to have time and is willing to test and commit
> something, it's not clear in which of the thousands of open tickets to
> start looking. (Trac searches and browsing through tickets based on
> specific criteria could be improved, but I'm not sure how.)

Such a person should search for tickets with the “haspatch” keyword; that keyword should probably only be used for patches that are ready to go.

https://trac.macports.org/query?status=!closed&keywords=~haspatch&desc=1&order=id


> That said, a git/hg mirror on GitHub/ButBucket would definitely be
> nice.

Why would that be nicer than the read-only git mirror that Mac OS Forge already provides here:

http://www.macosforge.org/post/git-mirrors/


> MacPorts could potentially offer a "selfupdate" from an
> arbitrary git/hg repository clone if necessary (but one can already
> have a clone on the filesystem and use that one).

selfupdate uses rsync only.

sync can use rsync or svn, possibly other version control systems already, I don’t remember.