[Python-Dev] PEP 481 - Migrate Some Supporting Repositories to Git and Github (original) (raw)

Donald Stufft donald at stufft.io
Sun Nov 30 18:00:18 CET 2014

On Nov 30, 2014, at 11:44 AM, Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote:

On Sun Nov 30 2014 at 10:55:26 AM Ian Cordasco <graffatcolmingov at gmail.com <mailto:graffatcolmingov at gmail.com>> wrote: On Sun, Nov 30, 2014 at 7:01 AM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net <mailto:solipsis at pitrou.net>> wrote: > On Sun, 30 Nov 2014 16:23:08 +1100 > Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com <mailto:rosuav at gmail.com>> wrote: >> >> Yes, GitHub is proprietary. But all of your actual code is stored in >> git, which is free, and it's easy to push that to a new host somewhere >> else, or create your own host. This proposal is for repositories that >> don't need much in the way of issue trackers etc, so shifting away >> from GitHub shouldn't demand anything beyond moving the repos >> themselves. > > I hope we're not proposing to move the issue trackers to github, > otherwise I'm -1 on this PEP. > > Regards > > Antoine. So I usually choose not to weigh in on discussions like these but there seems to be a lot of misdirection in some of these arguments. To start, I'm generally neutral about this proposal or Nick's proposal that spurred this one. I've found the most frustrating part of contributing to anything involving CPython to be the lack of reviewer time. I have had very small (2-line) patches take months (close to a year in reality) to get through in spite of periodically pinging the appropriate people. Moving to git/GitHub will not alleviate this at all. To be clear, the main reasoning behind Nick's was being able to submit changes without ever having to have a local copy of the repository in question on your machine. Having a complete web workflow for editing and contributing makes the barrier to entry far lower than switching VCS or anything else. BitBucket (apparently, although I've never used this) and GitHub both have this capability and both are free-as-in-beer systems. No one as I understand it is proposing that we use the per-distro proprietary interface to these websites. All data can be removed from GitHub using it's API and can generally be converted to another platform. The same goes for BitBucket although it's arguably easier to retrieve issue data from BitBucket than GitHub. That said, *the issue tracker is not covered by these proposals* so this is a moot point. Drop it already. If we're seriously considering moving to git as a DVCS, we should consider the real free-as-in-freedom alternatives that come very close to GitHub and can be improved by us (even though they're not written in Python). One of those is GitLab. We can self-host a GitLab instance easily or we can rely on gitlab.com <http://gitlab.com/>. GitLab aims to provide a very similar user experience to GitHub and it's slowly approaching feature parity and experience parity. GitLab is also what a lot of people chose to switch to after the incident Steven mentioned, which I don't think is something we should dismiss or ignore. We should refocus the discussion with the following in mind: - Migrating "data" from GitHub is easy. There are free-as-in-freedom tools to do it and the only cost is the time it would take to monitor the process - GitHub has a toxic company culture that we should be aware of before moving to it. They have a couple blog posts about attempting to change it but employees became eerily silent after the incident and have remained so from what I've personally seen. - GitHub may be popular but there are popular FOSS solutions that exist that we can also self-host at something like forge.python.org <http://forge.python.org/> - bugs.python.org <http://bugs.python.org/> is not covered by any of these proposals - The main benefit this proposal (and the proposal to move to BitBucket) are seeking to achieve is an online editing experience allowing for anyone with a browser and an account to contribute. This to me is the only reason I would be +1 for either of these proposals (if we can reach consensus). But that's not just it. As you pointed out, Ian, getting patch submissions committed faster would be a huge improvement over what we have today. GitHub/Bitbucket/whatever could help with this by giving core devs basic CI to know that I patch is sound to some extent as well as push button commits of patches. For me personally, if I knew a simple patch integrated cleanly and passed on at least one buildbot -- when it wasn't a platform-specific fix -- then I could easily push a "Commit" button and be done with it (although this assumes single branch committing; doing this across branches makes all of this difficult unless we finally resolve our Misc/NEWS conflict issues so that in some instances it can be automated). Instead I have to wait until I have a clone I can push from, download a patch, apply it, run the unit tests myself, do the commit, and then repeat a subset of that to whatever branches make sense. It's a lot of work for which some things could be automated.

Well there’s two sides to the contribution process.

There’s making things better/easier for people who aren’t committers and there is making things better/easier for people who are committers. Tacking extra things on to what we already have to improve the life of committers is easier in many ways. As committers they’ve likely already taken the time to learn the bespoke workflow that the Python project uses and have already gotten through that particular hurdle. Looking to standardize around popular tools is mostly about making it easier for new people and making it so that if they learn this set of tools they can go an immediately apply that to most of the other Python projects out there, or that if they are already contributing to those other Python projects they are probably aware of this particular toolchain and workflow and can apply that knowledge directly to the Python project.

Moving to some of these tools happens to come with it features like really nice CI integration and a nice "Merge" button that also make it a lot nicer for the committer side of things.

I think it's also hard to get a representation of the people for whom the bespoke workflow and less popular tooling are a problem for in a discussion on python-dev. My guess is most of those people would not have signed up for python-dev since, unless they were willing to take the time to learn that, so there is an amount of selection bias at play here as well.

Donald Stufft PGP: 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA

-------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/attachments/20141130/21a195e5/attachment.html>

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list