[Geany-devel] Git switch

Jason Oster jason.oster at xxxxx
Mon Jun 14 16:21:10 UTC 2010


Sorry for any noise this post might add!  Long response follows.

TL;DR:  Use Gitorious and Trac.


On 06/14/2010 12:47 AM, Lex Trotman wrote:
> As far as I can tell Jiri is the only one who has responded who has
> actual experience running a Git project and that is only on Gitoroius.
>   So I'd ask:
>
> * Does anyone else run a Git project, which host and whats the experience?
> * How many people contribute to one, and what hosting service do they
> use and what is the experience, is performance consistent and better
> than Sourceforge SVN, all around the world?
> * And does anyone have experience using any other DVCS and hosting
> service that would make them recommend it, or recommend against it?
> * should the bug tracker be moved?  Can it be done without losing anything?

I have experience with Mercurial (I manage a public repo containing 
several of my personal projects, and also a private repo for internal 
projects at work.)  And while the hosting is all 'self-contained' (e.g. 
the public repo is hosted directly out of Apache with hgweb.cgi, and the 
private repo is the built-in hgweb daemon) I've grown to love the 
minimalism of Mercurial's gitweb style.

I've also recently launched a new project on GoogleCode's hosting 
platform.  I cannot yet comment on how well their service works.  It 
seems it's not possible to simply clone hosted repos like with 
gitorious, for example.

> There are rather a lot of options listed here:
> https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/GitHosting  Has anyone used any?
>
> The important things we need to know about a hosting service are:
> * likely stability, some have gone offline during the GFC, but this is
> hard to judge
> * performance for a good range of users in a good range of locations
> * reliability, low downtime
> * features, hosting clones, bug tracking ?????

In that list, I've heard of only a few of them.  I would suggest 
avoiding github (total personal opinion, here; awful web interface, and 
the "network graph visualizer" requires Flash, which is purely 
ridiculous).  Both Gitorious and Savannah look great.

Gitorious maintains a fairly barebones service for git hosting, and its 
web interface looks ok.  Its shortcoming is that it doesn't integrate a 
tracker, so it can be difficult to link bugs with their relevant 
revisions in the repo (of course, you can always do that 'by hand' like 
you are now, but then that's one advantage of project hosting that 
you're missing out on!)

Savannah's main interface is really weird, but they do offer *gitweb[2] 
directly!  It also includes issue trackers, mailing lists, and other 
features that you can ignore if you don't need them.  I'm not sure how 
well these features integrate with each other.

It's worth noting that I don't have any actual experience with any of 
these services.  This is just from research I've done in the past while 
evaluating potential VCSs/hosting services.  (I ended up with Mercurial, 
and GoogleCode.)

That said, I only want to pose the following suggestion: Pick a hosting 
service that encourages development.  After revisiting some of these 
services, that only seems to be Gitorious.  That "clone repository" 
button is just too good to pass up, and the "merge requests" feature 
should come in handy, as well.

After a hosting service is settled on, you'll also wanta better issue 
tracker.  (I hate the SourceForge tracker.)  My suggestion here is 
Trac[2] with GitPlugin.  If it's possible to host Trac on geany.org, 
you'll be set; Trac includes a "sourceforge2trac.py" script to import 
the tickets from SF.

It seems reasonable to offer the source on a hosting platform like 
Gitorious, and hosting your own tracker that integrates with it directly.


* However, gitweb does pose some troubles when it does its 
"generating..." spin for a few seconds before giving the information 
asked for.  Pretty typical when browsing the web interface between 
commit logs and patches.


[1] http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/
[2] http://trac.edgewall.org/
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