Hosting and Supporting GIT conversion of Fedora CVS to enable downstream development efforts and distributions

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Nov 28, 2007 10:20 AM, Rahul Sundaram <sundaram at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> This involves figuring out which of the community setup services which
> the board needs to endorse as part of the Fedora brand and that involves
> some amount of rubber stamping IMO. Whether it is setup internally or
> hosted externally is really a implementation detail if we all have a
> better understanding of the kind of the things the Fedora Board
> collectively wants to see happen (ie) vision and that is the
> communication and direction that I am really asking for apart from
> whatever routine short term management of the project.

While vision is important, pointing in an arbitrary direction without
taking into account what the momentum isn't a particularly good way to
lead.  Momentum must be accounted for in such things, and quite
honestly I don't see much in the way of obvious momentum behind a
particular SCM.  Everyone wants a pony, no one can decide on what
color the pony needs to be.  I'd prefer to see an informed proposal
from the SCM SIG, before pointing off in an arbitrary direction
without the support of the people willing and capable of doing the
work to make it happen.  The Board is more effective if it spends more
time serving and supporting initiatives instead of dictating them.

Are you expecting the Board to be able to anticipate all the ways the
community members can be clever? Are you looking for unfunded and
unmanned directives for projects that the Board would like to see
implemented? In this specific case, I certainly never would have
thought of duplicating cvs as git. Shame on me.

I really dont know what sort of high level vision statement your
asking for here.
Does the board want Fedora to use a distributed SCM at some point? Is
that the sort of vision statement you want to hear.I personally don't
give a rats ass what pieces of technology Fedora as a project actually
makes a commitment to using as long as it makes it easier for us to be
a conduit for upstream development.  Any technology choice which makes
it easier for downstream to consume us, but doesn't make it easier for
downstream to contribute back to us and then us back into upstream
projects is NOT something I want to see and runs counter to the
upstreaming mantra.  Certainly duplicating our cvs as a git collection
is not going to help make it easier to contribute back to us and then
on into upstream.

The distributed SCM issue is absolutely mired in implementation
details.  Considering the landscape I'm not even sure we end up with a
net win in terms of easing the contribution burden by selecting a
single candidate technology.  I'm willing to wait for the SCM SIG to
present a roadmap.

> Agreed. As part of these, we should look into the kind of activities
> that help the Fedora "ecosystem" and not just the direct benefits for
> the project. Linking to Creative Commons from start.fp.o as an example
> of what we have already done along those lines.

If we had to host all of Creative Commons internally, we wouldn't be
able to do it. Supporting an externally hosted git duplication of our
cvs is still on the table in the original thread on the infrastructure
list.  Are we talking about linking to an externally hosted git
duplication of our cvs?

-jef