Re: [PATCH] remote-helpers: point at their upstream repositories

From: Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>
Date: May 20, 2014, 20:52 UTC
Message-ID: <537bc0a8eb91a_a6f166b308d@nysa.notmuch>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqha4lwj57.fsf@gitster.dls.corp.google.com>

Junio C Hamano wrote:

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> Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com> writes:
> 
> > Junio C Hamano wrote:
> >> 
> >> After looking at the reverse-depends list of packages, my faith is
> >> strengthened in that the Git ecosystem is truly maturing and useful
> >> third-party plug-ins will be picked up by distro packagers.
> >
> > Where is git-imerge packaged?
> 
> I didn't see it on the archive the said Ubuntu box slurps from, but
> I did not check all the other distros.

I will help you: it's not packaged anywhere.

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> > Do you want to bet? Nah, you don't *ever* want to accept you were wrong,
> > even you clearly where.
> > ...
> > This is what's going to happen: there won't be an official git-hg
> > package for *years*, if there is ever one. That is my prediction based
> > on all the available evidence, I am willing to stand by it and accept I
> > was wrong if it proves otherwise.
> >
> > Are you willing to stand by your own decisions?
> 
> If I understand correctly, you have made and you do maintain some
> packages and as an insider, you do not have to wait for "an
> outsider" to step up to make remote-{hg,bzr} packages yourself.

No, you do not understand how packaging works. ArchLinux's AUR[1] is a community-driven repository, anybody can package anything and put it there. That doesn't mean people can simply do `pacman -S git-remote-hg`, far from it.

It's a placeholder for *outsiders*, not official package maintainers.

I am an outsider in ArchLinux.

> You may already have done so for your own use and told other people
> about them, and others may have chosen to wait for you to push them to
> distros instead of championing these tools by packaging them
> themselves.

You clearly haven't tried to package anything for any distro. You can't just champion packages for a distribution. You have to go through an arduous process before becoming an official packager.

> When you have such an influence on the outcome either way of your
> choice, I do not see much value in such a bet.

If I champion these packages I would be making you win the bet. Why would I do that?

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> But I actually think that "we package what we want to use" is a good
> thing for programs whose primary audience is the software developer
> types.  The packagers are part of their audiences [*1*].  Because of
> that, even if remote-{hg,bzr} do not get packaged for a long time, I
> doubt that it tells us what you are stipulating.  The only thing we
> can infer would be that these programs did not interest the software
> developer types to motivate them enough, and we wouldn't know why
> they found the programs uninteresting.  It may be because those who
> have history in Hg prefer to interact with remote Git repositories
> by pushing into and fetching from them using Hg tools than using Git
> tools.  It would not indicate "useful tools fall through the cracks"
> if it were the case, would it?

Or it might mean that the people that would otherwise do that packaging instead simply copy the single file needed manually.

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> Indeed I saw bzr-git that came from the Bazaar land packaged on the
> box I mentioned, and its description sounded like it is meant to
> work in such a way that allows Bazaar commits to be pushed to Git
> repositories using a bzr tool.
> 
> By the way, I also saw git-mediawiki packaged from contrib/ in our
> tree.  I found it not very credible to say "contrib/ is treated as a
> single ball of wax without much value by packagers, and we need to
> move the helpers up to core in order for them to be used more
> widely" after seeing that.

You are misconstruing what I said. I said *most* distributions treat contrib as a ball of wax. And I said there were a few *exceptions* on this ball of wax, like completions. remote-helpers are not part of these exceptions (with the exception of git-bzr).

> *1* I saw you called them "wolves" at least twice recently---where
>     does such a distrust come from?

It's a jungle out there, and it's every out-of-tree tool by itself. Most of the tools on the contrib/ area would not survive if you throw them to those "wolves", and you know it.

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_User_Repository

-- 
Felipe Contreras