[Biopython-dev] SVN migration and Launchpad mirroring

[Bartek Wilczynski]

Hi,

On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 5:43 PM, Giovanni Marco Dall'Olio
<dalloliogm at gmail.com> wrote:

> In github, for every repository there is a button to create a fork and
> automatically add it to to your own space.
> Look at the image in this post:
> - http://github.com/guides/keeping-a-git-fork-in-sync-with-the-forked-repo
> Is there something similar with launchpad? Or is it planned to be?
>

No. As far as I know you need to branch using bzr to your machine and then
you need to push it. It looks like this:
bzr branch lp:branch-name
then you get a local repo with all version history. Now you can register your
branch to your launchpad account:
bzr push lp:~username/project/branch

In principle, you would do that only if you want other people to access it.
Normally, I would publish only branches which have been modified in some
 meaningful way, and to modify it, you need to download it to your computer
anyway... But having such a button might make it easier for people to branch
and stimulate contributions. In launchpad, instead of a button you have the
exact command printed on the page so that you can paste it into your console.

> Moreover, in github there are many tools that shows the ramifications
> of all the repositories coming from the original one, with a very nice
> view (it's this link,
> again:http://github.com/blog/39-say-hello-to-the-network-graph-visualizer)
>
Yeah, It's nice to see all stuff that's going on in all branches
forked from the trunk.
In launchpad, you have only a list of branches already submitted for
merging. I think
it's again a different philosphy, which reduces the amount of
information to process
for maintainers (you only see mature changes submitted for merging
into the trunk)
but you might miss all the stuff which was not submitted (and which
you would see in
github). It's hard to predict how many branches with active
development we will have
in BioPython, but generally I think the more info we have the better.

> Let's say I fork your repository as you explained: how would you do to
> keep track of all the forks originated from your repository? Will you
> get notified that I have forked your repo?
Not by default. I think you can be modified to some extent by plugins,
but I have no
experience here. Again, I don't think that tracking _all_ branches is
necessary (and
sometimes simply not possible: people can branch anonymously) but having some
statistics on how many times a project was branched (i.e. downloaded)
could be interesting.


>
> By the way, do you have any clue on how to configure bazaar under a proxy? :)
>
I'm not sure what do you mean. Are you behind a http proxy? If you are
a registered
user of launchpad, the communication is done via ssh, so there should
be no problem.
I don't know if there are any problems with using launchpad
anonymously. What is your
setup and what fails?


>> but my current understanding of
>> the possibilities is as follows:
>> I don't know about any service to _automaticaly_ synchronize CVS (or
>> SVN) repo with git.
>
> I don't know, but maybe the bioruby developers already know how to do
> it already.
According to their website, they just switched to Github. CVS is not
synchronized
(hasn't been updated for more than 6 months), but they might now about tools.


cheers
Bartek