life at the end of the universe

Comment by Tom

June 19, 2010 @ 3:07 pm

As an outsider I am very disappointed to hear this. Why not move to gitorious? Qt is already there and so are a lot of KDE projects. My guess is that egos were involved in this IMNSHO very stupid decision. Why not work together and make contributing easy and social?

Comment by Lydia

June 19, 2010 @ 3:15 pm

Tom, you are of course entitled to your opinion. But you should do your homework first. Things are not that easy. There has gone a lot of thought into that decision. You might find those two links helpful: http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-scm-interest/2010-June/001438.html http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-scm-interest/2010-June/001439.html

Short version: It has absolutely zero to do with egos and is definitely not stupid.

Comment by Eike Hein

June 19, 2010 @ 3:47 pm

Also note that the KDE projects currently on Gitorious are expected migrate to KDE’s own Git hosting infrastructure. Amarok and Konversation were the first to move yesterday so we have projects to ramp up the new setup with, but others will follow.

Comment by pano

June 19, 2010 @ 3:54 pm

Since Gitorious is under the AGPL, wouldn’t it be possible to host your own Gitorious server?
Or are there any disadvantages to that?

Thanks

Comment by Lydia

June 19, 2010 @ 3:57 pm

Jep would be possible. Jep there would be quite some disadvantages to that – see links in previous comments for details.

Comment by rockama

June 19, 2010 @ 3:58 pm

I thought you would use the gitorious interface on kde servers?
Anyway, great to see KDE finally ready to switch.

Comment by Tom

June 19, 2010 @ 4:30 pm

My homework? Not that I need to but I read those mails and there are not really any convincing reasons mentioned. (Maybe in the speadsheet, but I wouldn’t call a non-working IRC channel crucial)

Thing is gitorious obviously has a lot of pros (community, great webinterface, Qt, support) it would have been nice to read a clear statement about the downsides and those mails are not really sufficient in that regard. I guess it was costs, support and maybe something like NIN. Someone was not willing to compromise.

Comment by Lydia

June 19, 2010 @ 4:38 pm

The doc and spreadsheet attached to that email has all the points that made us consider hosting our own git infrastructure. And those are as clear a statement as you will get out of respect for gitorious. Sorry.

Comment by friesoft

June 19, 2010 @ 4:59 pm

I didn’t yet have time yet to read those links provided, but I wonder how to create your own clones now…
on gitorious this was very easy… is there/will there be an easy way?
I know offline commits and such stuff… but I like experimenting with some stuff but still have those up on a server…

I hope you got my point and I would be glad if you could answer this question.

Nonetheless: great step forward and keep up the good work

Comment by Eike Hein

June 19, 2010 @ 5:01 pm

Actually, to clarify a bit: The report is about our software choice for self-hosting. The reason the report was written was because hosting on Gitorious.org (the website run by shortcut) was no longer on the table as an option (since a mutual agreement between KDE and Shortcut could not be reached). My mail to kde-scm-interest explains that sequence of events .

Comment by Eike Hein

June 19, 2010 @ 5:06 pm

@friesoft: You can still keep your personal clones on Gitorious.org (or GitHub, etc.) just like now. Just clone Amarok from git.kde.org and then push that up as a personal repo under your account on Gitorious.org.

KDE developers will also be able to create personal clones on git.kde.org, but we’re currently not prepared to offer that to the public.

Comment by friesoft

June 19, 2010 @ 5:10 pm

@eike: thx for answering… just started reading the mails…

I see… nice that it will be possible somehow… even though I will really miss the ease of easy cloning by just clicking a button and having my own clone like on gitorious… will something like that ever be possible/is that desired?

Comment by Eike Hein

June 19, 2010 @ 5:17 pm

I won’t rule it out, but I also can’t make any promises – it’s a question of capacity (both technical and manpower), liability and so on. Right now the most important part is to get the ball rolling again and make forward progress on the SVN->Git migration of KDE (let’s keep in mind that while a small number of projects got to test Gitorious.org, most of KDE’s devs are still stuck with SVN!) after being blocked for eight months or so on the negotiations with Shortcut. So we’re looking to ramp things up quickly, and then we’ll see in the future in what ways we can extend our offering further .

Comment by Jeff Mitchell

June 19, 2010 @ 6:16 pm

@friesoft If you’re a kde developer, cloning will be quite easy — a simple command passed in to ssh via git.kde.org.

It’s worth noting that even if we had gone with self-hosted Gitorious, we would not have been prepared (at least not currently, and not in the foreseeable future) to offer the ability for the public to create clones. Our capacity is much more limited than Gitorious.org.

Although Tom seems to feel like this is due to NIN (although I don’t know what Trent Reznor has to do with KDE, but if there’s even a tenuous connection, awesome!), the plain fact is that we were unable to reach agreements with the Gitorious.org folks for hosting there. Once Gitorious.org was off the table, the focus switched to whether, in a *self-hosted* scenario, Gitorious was still our best option. As the report concludes, it wasn’t. (Also, using existing bits of software, like Gitolite, Redmine, and cgit, is hardly NIH syndrome at work.)

Comment by areader

June 20, 2010 @ 6:17 pm

Please use readable fonts. Gray type on a white background is difficult to read.

thx, a fan

Comment by Lydia

June 21, 2010 @ 11:55 am

Woah…. I have fans!!!1111eleven
But you’re right. I’ll try to make it more readable when I have a few mins for it.

Comment by Rick Stanley

June 21, 2010 @ 5:00 pm

@Lydia

In the Spreadsheet, in Cell D3, it says:

“Ruby on Rails. JavaScript ActiveMQ/STOMP. Sphinx. Custom git-daemon. MySQL. *SEE WARNING*”

Where is the **WARNING**? Am I missing something?

Comment by Jeff Mitchell

June 21, 2010 @ 5:09 pm

Two cells to the right, in the Notes entry for that line.

Comment by Ulrik Mikaelsson

June 21, 2010 @ 8:21 pm

Great to hear the Git-transitions will finally likely happen.

Being a drive-by-commiter for a few years back, and for a time tried to maintain my own experimental patchset-branch of KDE over a few releases, I’ve found SVN more than a little unwieldy.

Sure, I’ve managed decently with git-svn, but great news to hear KDE will now support distributed development models. When time allows, I feel inspired to restart my little “Hotkeys-mode” branch of KDE.

Pingback by Looking at Konversation « Bobulate

June 22, 2010 @ 7:23 pm

[...] course, since it’s in git (on git.kde.org now!) I may as well see if I can write some patches for these issues, if only as practice in using [...]

Comment by habarnam

June 30, 2010 @ 1:10 pm

Hello Lidya,

Is there a http:// access method for the git repository (I haven’t managed to find mentions of one so far)?

Due to some company firewall policies I can’t access the git:// repositories and I can’t get my daily fix of Amarok.

Comment by Jeff Mitchell

June 30, 2010 @ 8:20 pm

@Habarnam

Indeed there is. However, note that the HTTP method is *very slow*, and doesn’t give you status updates in the middle…so it can appear to “hang” while you do commands. The initial clone especially can take a beastly amount of time — maybe 10 minutes or more. You can try setting the GIT_CURL_VERBOSE environment variable to 1 to get quite verbose status messages.

If you do this you may notice that you get a ton of 404 errors; I don’t know the details of how Git works over HTTP but it seems to request a lot of objects that are in packs before requesting the pack itself. This is probably one reason why it’s sooooo slooooooow. But, ignore those errors and eventually it’ll complete.

One last thing — when using the http method, be sure to specify the .git at the end:

git clone http://git.kde.org/amarok/amarok.git

Good luck!