[asterisk-scf-dev] Consolidate git repos?

[Russell Bryant]

On Wed, 2010-10-13 at 07:57 -0500, Kevin P. Fleming wrote:
> On 10/13/2010 07:35 AM, Russell Bryant wrote:

> > It's also just an issue with barrier to entry to contribute.  It's just more work on the contributor to have to generate a patch for every repo and work with the code review process/tool to push each one through the workflow.  It would be easier to contribute (and easier for the reviewer IMO) if more code was together.
> 
> There aren't patches to be generated. The contributor makes their
> changes, pushes them to a team developer repository, and when they are
> ready to be reviewed, they get pulled into a branch in the relevant
> integration repository... where they can be reviewed, modified, etc.
> until they are ready for merging.

Ok, well whatever the contribution process is going to be ... git
clones, branches, code reviews in some web app, whatever ... is x number
of components more work to move the change through the process if the
change has wide reaching scope.  I would expect those type of changes to
be common in early development.

For example, in an earlier message, I identified some small proposed
changes to the Session and SessionListener interfaces.  I can code it
and run tests in less than an hour, I'm sure.  To submit it, I would
have to change 4 repositories, I think (slice, routing, bridging, sip).
I would have to push 4 modified git clones into my team area, push those
changes into 4 different integration repositories, create 4 different
review requests in a code review system, and eventually push changes to
4 different release repositories.  That just seems like more work than
it should be to me.

I'm coming at this as a potential contributor with a desire to maximize
how much I can accomplish with the small amount of personal time I am
able to devote to this.  People have complained about the increased
barrier to contribution to Asterisk just by adding the requirement of
getting code peer reviewed.  Reducing the barrier to contribution is one
of many critical factors to help ensure that Asterisk SCF succeeds in
building an open source development community, and isn't 100% developed
by the team paid to do so as their full time job.

If it really is the right thing to do to keep fine grained repositories,
I trust the decision of the team.  I just request that barrier to entry
for contributors (and ease of packaging and understanding by the user
community, as discussed in other parts of this thread) is heavily taken
into account in the decision.

-- 
Russell Bryant
Digium, Inc.  |  Engineering Manager, Open Source Software
445 Jan Davis Drive NW   -    Huntsville, AL 35806  -  USA
jabber: rbryant at digium.com    -=-    skype: russell-bryant
www.digium.com -=- www.asterisk.org -=- blogs.asterisk.org