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Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Gently migrating to Git + Gerrit

From: Bálint Réczey <balint@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 6 Aug 2013 13:18:42 +0200
Hi Gerald,

2013/8/6 Gerald Combs <gerald@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> I finally have some time set aside to do more work on the Git migration.
> I'm hoping to do the following in the near future:
Great!

>
> Switch code.wireshark.org from gitweb to cgit.
>
> This isn't strictly necessary but IMHO cgit has a slightly nicer
> interface and its URL format appears to be much more sane.
>
>
> Install Gerrit.
>
> I need to do a bit of infrastructure work beforehand, but hopefully it
> won't be too difficult.
>
>
> Create our first read/write Git+Gerrit repository.
I would happily help in administering the roles, etc. I have a lot of
experience in
moving in to Gerrit. :-)

>
> I think a combined version of wireshark-win{32,64}-libs would be a good
> candidate since they could use a bit of reorganization and it would be a
> good excuse for me to check in the scripts that I use to build our
> home-grown packages.
Starting with something small is generally a good idea, but IMHO the *libs
repository may not be the best candidate to move to Git in its current form.

Currently all the library archives are stored in SVN and if we simply convert it
to Git anyone cloning the repository would have to download all the libs ever
checked in (unless using git clone --depth which imposes other limitations).
Handling binary files is not exactly where Git shines. There is a
separate project,
git-annex to support using Git helping file storage, but Windows support is not
perfect according to the project's page [1].

Regarding the libraries I think it would probably be enough to use a
downloadable
.zip file containing a snapshot of the needed Windows libraries
instead of cloning
a Subversion/Git repository to the machine. The scripts maintaining the snapshot
could be stored in Git, of course, but I'm not sure if rethinking the
library installation
should happen before moving the main codebase to Gerrit.

I think simply creating a sandbox repository of Wireshark's source in
Gerrit would give
developers a good opportunity to try the workflow and we can delete
the sandbox and
make the switch after enough developers are confident with it.

>
> Once that's done we should have a good idea about how the workflow
> described at
>
>   http://wiki.wireshark.org/Development/Workflow
>
> will work in our environment and what we need to do to get there.

Cheers,
Balint

[1] http://git-annex.branchable.com/todo/windows_support/