I sent this post to the Sparkle mailing list as well, but I thought I’d post it here to be more certain that I’m not screwing up.
I’ve decided I’m only willing to keep working on Sparkle if it’s not going to annoy me, and there are a few things that are annoying me:
- The state of the codebase. With this refactoring, I’m mostly happy. There’s a little more to do, but not a ton.
- Trac. I hate Trac. I hate it in the face.
- SVN. Someone sends me a patch, but it’s for three versions ago, so I have to apply it by hand. And then projects which have their own modifications are permanently behind, so we get things like Adium 1.1 exploding in a giant fireball.
I think my plan right now is to switch to LaunchPad, using Bazaar for RCS. The alternative is Lighthouse with Git for RCS through GitHub. So here’s the way I see things:
LaunchPad+Bazaar:
- Advantages:
- LaunchPad has “questions” as a separate thing from normal tickets. I like this a lot.
- LaunchPad has an “idea tracking” feature called Blueprints which could be really useful.
- The translations feature on LaunchPad could potentially be very useful.
- It’s one site instead of two.
- Bazaar is a hell of lot easier to use than Git.
- Bazaar has friendly revision numbers.
- Disadvantages:
- Not quite as shiny as the alternative.
- Has a slightly Ubuntu-y taste.
- Feels “bigger”.
- Bazaar doesn’t have as good adoption as Git.
Lighthouse+Git[Hub]:
- Advantages:
- Shiny and in fashion.
- More “powerful” in ways I probably don’t care about.
- Disadvantages:
- Two sites instead of one; users have to register at both places.
- Git is more confusing.
- Doesn’t have translations, blueprints, or questions.
- Lighthouse seems clumsy compared to LaunchPad in ways I can’t describe.
So I’m going to start working on making the former happen, but if there’s a really good reason we should be using Lighthouse+Git[Hub], please let me know.
The Conversation {7 comments}
I’m still not really clear what confuses you about git. Mind you, it doesn’t particularly matter—I’m not going to argue that your comfort level with bazaar is somehow “wrong”!—it’s mainly confusion on my part because I grokked git pretty easily.
I think it might be partly timing. I came to git pretty recently, and it’s a much more usable system now than it had been, or so I’m told.
Agreed, git was historically difficult. It was my daughter’s (12) first revision control system and she didn’t seem to have any trouble understanding it.
Note that git does have reasonably friendly revision numbers as long as you’ve tagged a version before (for example: 2.0.2-42-gef07611 — that’s 42 changes past my 2.0.2 release, plus a part of a hash to uniquely identify exactly *which* 42 changes after).
Before git, I was using mercurial, and before that, darcs and gnu arch. bzr seems to have come from gnu arch, but from what I’ve read, it’s much less pleasant to use.
Your post has inspired me to give it a go, but it doesn’t run out of macports for me at the moment.
Overall, any project pulled off of subversion is a win for open source (I’m sure I’ve sent one of those patches you’re complaining about).
Thanks for your feedback, guys!
I’m hearing a lot of “but Git is neat and not as hard as you think,” which is cool, but if Git is easy, Bazaar is even easier. And LaunchPad has more features and is unified.
I guess my point is that I’m a lot more concerned about the GitHub+Lighthouse vs. LaunchPad part than the Git vs. Bazaar part. Any thoughts on that?
Andy,
Another site you might want to consider is unfuddle as they now have git support. Not sure if you have looked at them at all.
Am I correct in thinking registering for GitHub would only need to be done if you wanted to follow the repository via GitHub itself? It seems like actions like cloning, pulling, pushing, etc could be done via git alone.
I am a newby to Git and GitHub, so I could be way off, but it doesn’t seem that users of Sparkle would be put off by the use of Git. It would seem that even possible maintainers would not have to use GitHub’s interface if they don’t want to.
I do see a possible issue in picking a DVCS that isn’t in use by many of your possible committers and users though. Especially considering Bazaar 1.4 doesn’t seem to be easy to get going on OS X this second.
> Am I correct in thinking registering for GitHub would only need to be done if you wanted to follow the repository via GitHub itself?
No, you can get an RSS feed anonymously, and you can put up a clone on your own web server if you’d like to avoid github altogether (except as a remote).
Bazaar is *so nice*. I’m still sad I didn’t convince the rest of the Adium team to go for it over Hg :/
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