Hi Jakob,
On Oct 4, 2020, at 6:14 PM, Jakob Reschke forums.jakob@resfarm.de wrote:
Hi Chris,
I suppose many of us drawn towards Git instead of Monticello find Monticello lacking in not only minor ways. The alternative or improvement needs not necessarily be Git, but given its acceptance in the wider developer community, it is an obvious choice.
Chris Muller-3 wrote
For me, it's not really anything about any "feelings" about Git as the (im)practicality of integration. It's a beast. To bring a beast into _everyone's_ workflow that has 90% more "stuff" than we need [...]
What exactly do you think is so massive about Git? The basics are really quite simple. The complexity comes with the vast number of possibilities to transform a graph of history, and canonical Git supporting many of them, but you do not have to do or support all of these. Other idiosyncrasies of Git can be simply omitted. For example, you will not find anything about the "index" or staging area of Git in the Git Browser tools. Git vocabulary is different from Monticello vocabulary (that is true for almost all pairs of version control systems) and Git has some different ideas of how tracking works and what to put in a single repository. But if you stick to the Monticello workflows and know the corresponding Git vocabulary, I contend that Git is not more complicated than Monticello. Fixing a Monticello ancestry is at least as complicated as doing a rebase ("advanced feature") in Git; after you have learned either, you can confidently wield either.
In other ways, Monticello just looks simpler because something is in fact missing. Consider branches: most Git tools have knobs to deal with them in various ways, while Monticello tools just deny to talk about branches. Monticello ancestry does support branching, yet I think Monticello lacks first-class objects for branches, with all the implications for repository handling. The tools might look simpler without branch management, but it is not a feature but rather the lack of one. Note that you can also avoid branch management in Git: just stay on the mainline branch forever and merge your commits back and forth with the upstream repository's mainline. While it might appear simpler that way, you might as well call it less organized.
Monticello supports branches. And merging between them is as easy as merging any other version of a package. And Monticello does support recording histories across branches.
The two things that Monticello has over git are - that it is used without leaving the image. I’ve yet to see a git integration where at some stage one was forced to try and fix things in git, or that the image and the git repository got out of sync, or that if one tried to use more than one image against a git repository something horrible broke - that it can be extended using our own tools. Git is written in C and controlled by a separate community. One gives up great autonomy when allowing ones core VCS to be in a foreign system. When git crashes it crashes. It doesn’t raise a friendly debugger in which one can determine and fix and proceed from the bug, it segfaults, in optimized code, and you’re hosed.
Personally I don’t want to work in that kind of world. The Pharo crowd do. I will do everything in my power to prevent Squeak going the same way. And if I’m unsuccessful I’ll go somewhere else.
Chris Muller-3 wrote
[...] requires them to sign up just to use -- I think it would be a "filter" on the community, especially of non-developers (hint: You and Jakob are developers). For me, being hosted by a private company is not so attractive.
As Phil pointed out, you seem to confuse Git with GitHub here. But your arguments are applicable if we take the integrated issue tracker into account because that needs to be run by someone. In theory Squeak could host an own GitLab Community Edition server instead of relying on GitHub.
Note that you also have to sign up to use Mantis or participate on the mailing list or the Slack channel.
About the "filter": how many non-developers try to trace inbox contributions or engage in code reviews? How many non-developers use Monticello (given that it can only track packages and configuations thereof)? The "filter" might not take anything interesting away from the other target audiences after all.
We do not wish to move all discussions from the list to pull requests. Also the idea was to link up pull request conversations with the list, like the CI job reports, or conversations on the OpenSmalltalk-VM repository to the vm-dev list.
Chris Muller-3 wrote
For example, you could submit an improvement that allows original contributors of Inbox items to move them to Treated themself.
How? Only Trunk committers have access to the Squeaksource treating backend, so neither the code nor the tool is available to normal users for improvement. Guest users cannot even delete versions from the inbox repository, can they?
Chris Muller-3 wrote
You could add a button to filter out all entries in the Inbox which have further descendants also in the Inbox. You could make an, "update from Inbox" which would only download packages for which have your loaded versions as ancestors.
I don't understand how these would help in the tracking of issues, can you elaborate please? My understanding: The first shows you the tips of all loose branches in the inbox, but still without a mapping to issues (which is not necessarily a 1:1 mapping, with reinforced complexity because of the drive towards a compact ancestry...). Combined with some client-side extensions it might allow us to track branches locally, but not share them explicitly. To find remote branches, you would have to download many of these versions first because only then you can access their ancestry (you don't know in advance which versions are the tips, and combined with the redundancy among versions, this is a Monticello implementation flaw). The second would allow an update if someone moved some of your own branches forward. But it rarely happens nowadays.
Chris Muller-3 wrote
There are many simple things that could be done. A bug-tracker is a bigger deal, but it's often a lot less overhead to just FIX the bug than open, track, and close a bug report. We do have Mantis to keep track of the longer-term bugs.
I think this plays down the issue. It being a bigger deal is exactly why we would like to use an existing platform. "Just FIX the bug" is not always so straightforward that a single new version is sufficient. There might be multiple iterations, or multiple packages affected, or many versions towards a larger goal over an extended period of time. That's why we would like some integrated issue tracking, even for short-term bugs. Think more of pull requests with conversation and review facilities than of bug tickets. Pull requests, combined with a system that can actually track branches or tasks, allow for iterative refinement and feedback while binding all the iterations or steps together.
Mantis is not integrated with Monticello, is it? Also it doesn't look very active.
Chris Muller-3 wrote
We have *decades* of Monticello packages for Squeak across not just our own repositories, but many other "external" legacy repositories. [...] Monticello will continue to be used by some.
In my opinion this is no argument against different tools because nobody suggested to remove Monticello from Squeak. As we already see in practice, Git tools and Monticello tools, as well as both kinds of repositories, can co-exist.
Otherwise we could still use floppy disks because there are decades of software packages that were distributed on floppy disks, yet we don't. :-)
Chris Muller-3 wrote
It seems clear that the only path to Git and other tools is a backward-compatible integration with existing tools
Well, other paths have already been walked. ;-) But in which direction goes this backwards- compatibility? Do you want be able to use newer tools also on old repositories? Alright, that would be nice. Do you want to be able to use newer repositories in old tools? Why, given that it will probably restrict the newer repositories?
Chris Muller-3 wrote
a "stepping stone" that doesn't require a major adjustment like losing method-level timestamp information.
This seems to confound the use of Git with the use of the Tonel format with a Pharo-style implementation.
Otherwise it affirms what I wrote a few messages before: maybe we do have to bite the bullet and write a proper MCGitRepository that molds Git-hosted projects into the Monticello tools, even though we have already created other tools.
By the way, the draft spec of Tonel that Martin was offering to the list in a recent thread demands that custom attributes on classes, methods, ... be preserved by the system. So even if Squeak woulde use Tonel more often in the future, it would not necessarily mean that method timestamps have to be sacrificed. Squot and its Git tools are stored in the FileTree format, have been Git-hosted from the start, include some packages whose Monticello ancestries have been converted and integrated into the Git history, and has method timestamps all over.
Chris Muller-3 wrote
But it's not going to write itself. Only the burning interest within people like you and/or Jakob will get it done. :)
Thank you for the encouragement. Unfortunately with regards to Monticello tools it recurrently sounds like: "If you want contemporary features, you must add them to the old tools because we do not want to adopt new tools that can already do the job." Forgive me if this reads too polemic.
Kind regards, Jakob
-- Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Squeak-Dev-f45488.html