Proposal : aggregated dlang git repository

[Dicebot via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 11 February 2015 at 16:16:41 UTC, Andrei 
Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 2/11/15 5:48 AM, Dicebot wrote:
>> There seems to be a weird miscommunication here. I have asked 
>> your
>> opinion about this specific proposal - does it seem useful to 
>> you, would
>> you be willing to endorse it as official starting point for D
>> development etc.
>
> Problem is I don't know. That's why I submitted that task 
> https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11792 
> "Investigate...". I'm not a git expert so I don't have answers 
> to a bunch of questions.

That is perfectly fine - I can't guess what are questions are not 
clear without some non-expert feedback. It would be weird to do 
anything like that without ensuring you understand the rationale 
behind proposal.

Your list of questions was very insightful. I will relevant 
information to readme once it is nailed down in this discussion.

> * What's going to happen with the commit history for our 
> current projects?

> * How about the pull requests history?

2 x "nothing changes". Important rationale I had in mind when 
choosing this specific layout is to make it purely additive 
change, without breaking anything in established development 
habits. Goal is to formalize existing working conventions into 
something that is stronger than convention,

> * What are the changes in workflow compared to the current 
> situation?

No mandatory changes - existing developers can keep their habits. 
In the long term I'd like to move makefile targets that make 
assumptions about external repos (like dlang.org phobos docs 
generation) into aggregated repos - but even that is optional and 
will happen only if no one objects.

> * What tasks will be easier?

Getting working set of git master tools from scratch will be 
considerably easier.

git clone git at github.com:D-Programming-Language:dlang.git
cd dlang
./dlang.d update
./dlang.d build
# all done, just add ./bin to PATH and get all stuff
# available : dmd-dev, dub-dev, docs and whatever we add later
# same on all platforms

vs

mkdir dlang; cd dlang
git clone git at github.com:D-Programming-Language:dmd.git
git clone git at github.com:D-Programming-Language:druntime.git
git clone git at github.com:D-Programming-Language:phobos.git
git clone git at github.com:D-Programming-Language:dlang.org.git
git clone git at github.com:D-Programming-Language:tools.git
git clone git at github.com:D-Programming-Language:dub.git
# more and more
cd dmd
make -f posix.mak; cd ..
cd .druntime
make -f posix.mak; cd ..
# repeat something like that for each repo. sometimes different 
commands
# and for Windows entire flow is different
install -m 655 ./dmd/src/dmd /usr/local/bin/dmd-dev
# I am not even sure I haven't missed anything at this point

http://github.com/D-Programming-Language/installer contains some 
of needed automation but it misses important "cross-platform 
development uniformity" bit.

> * What tasks will be more difficult?

Small added effort for release manager to update submodules in 
meta-repo upon new releases. Can't really imagine anything else 
right now.

> And probably more questions I don't even know what they are. 
> FWIW Martin Nowak is a key person to convince of the advantages 
> of the change.

It will be next step. No point in discussing smaller details with 
Martin if I can't communicate general concept to you first.

> - The "getting started" advantage can be achieved on top of our 
> current layout with tactical tools such as documentation and 
> tools/update.sh. There's work there, of course.

Consider this whole proposal as "tools/update.sh done right". It 
has similar goal but eliminations all possible conventions (which 
are inherent points of failure) and demands cross-platfrom 
uniformity as mandatory.

> - I noticed people who contribute to dmd, druntime, and phobos 
> are relatively specialized, i.e. Kenji seldom gets into phobos, 
> H.S. Teoh seldom gets into dmd etc. That does seem to be an 
> argument in favor of the current modularity. Furthermore they 
> seem to have little friction getting into these projects if 
> they do want to.

While I was regular Phobos reviewer my attention was focused 
there too. But I still had to build latest dmd to test changes, 
build latest dlang.org to check documentation updated and 
struggle each time proposed changes fail only on Windows for 
unclear reason.

> Probably the main question is whether tooling with our layout 
> is just fine.

Please ask more questions if I have not explained something in 
good enough details.