[Geany-devel] GProject - missing Geany patches

[Jiří Techet]

On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 02:58, Matthew Brush <mbrush at codebrainz.ca> wrote:
> On 04/26/11 11:45, Dimitar Zhekov wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, 26 Apr 2011 11:18:16 +0200
>> Jiří Techet<techet at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>
>>> more than two weeks have passed without any response and I fear it
>>> will end the same way as many times before - that I post my patches,
>>> nobody looks at them and they get forgotten. I fully understand that
>>> people have limited time to work on geany (so do I), the problem is
>>> that most of the patches are 9 months old and they haven't been
>>> reviewed so far.
>>
>> Not an exception, the X session management is 9 months old too. Perhaps
>> we should create a geany-patches project or something?..
>
> It seems to me that the whole problem could be (dis)solved using (for
> example) GitHub since you can just fork the main repository, hack hack hack,
> and send a pull request/patch, which winds up in a proper "queue" of pull
> requests right on the main project repo in a pretty list, so people wanting
> these features before the developers get time to review them, can see all of
> these requests in the queue and know they are coming or are available
> through the forked repositories.  Additionally, the core developers get a
> nice list of pending pull requests to work through, that never gets buried
> or forgotten, and other "outside" developers can know what everyone else
> everyone is doing.  Also, with using such a VCS, all the patches have the
> correct authors and can be blamed and so on, complete with a perfect history
> of the project (including developers who don't have commit access on the
> main repository).
>
> The icing on the cake, is all the cool network, impact, etc graphs and
> wicked interface for viewing project history, creating patches, and even
> committing small bits of code straight through the website (directly on the
> file or through Gists/pastebins).
>
> I'm saying GitHub because I've only really used this site, I know there are
> other similar sites, but GitHub interface is *very* nice in comparison to
> say Gitorious or Launchpad.  Also, I don't mean to start a holy war of VCS,
> I know people all have preferences, but my observation is that all of these
> DVCS foster community involvement more and lower the barrier of entry to
> helping out greatly.
>
> Sorry if I sound like I'm on the sales team of GitHub or something, but
> after using it for a while, SourceForge/SVN seems crude in comparison, and I
> get really frustrated trying to use the SourceForge interface and
> contributing to projects hosted on it, especially ones using centralized
> VCS.

I couldn't agree more! I was proposing a switch to git a year ago here:

http://lists.uvena.de/geany-devel/2010-June/002602.html

The conclusion was that nobody was really opposed to it but nobody
felt an urgent need for it either so it was left as "maybe in the
future". But maybe it's a good time now to renew the discussion now.

Apart from the advantages you mention, using git also greatly reduces
maintainer's time when the maintainer trusts the developer who
submitted the patches - then the patch "review" can be reduced just to

git pull patches_for_review
git push

I'm using gitorious and have no experience with github but I must
confess that I'm not completely satisfied with the user interface so
maybe github is a better option (personally I don't care so much).

So in short, I agree that using git as VCS could greatly contribute to
both fixing the "lost patches problem" and, more importantly,
significantly reducing the maintainer's work. I'll be more than happy
to help with the VCS migration if the geany community decides for it.

Cheers,

Jiri