[mythtv] should mythtv be forked?

Daniel Thor Kristjansson danielk at mrl.nyu.edu
Mon Mar 21 18:51:58 UTC 2005


On Mon, 21 Mar 2005, Isaac Richards wrote:
]On Monday 21 March 2005 12:42 pm, andrew burke wrote:
]> For the third time, I will offer to help convert mythtv over to subversion
]> w/ trac for bug/issue tracking.  I will also help develop a strategy that
]> would result in more end-user-friendly branches, etc.
You are free to do this, but I think you will find that you can get more 
done by contributing some patches to MythTV. Nothing prevents you from
creating AndyTV = MythTV + your own patches + patches you like, and 
hosting it somewhere though. There is already a branch for people using 
MythTV in their cars.

]> If, on the other hand, the devs on this list are absolutely not interested
]> in the user experience with myth, there is the possibility of forking off
]> a different tree that's less dev-centric and more user-centric.
]Right, because what type of repository the source is stored in is absolutely 
]integral to the end user experience.  That's laughable, really.  I'm happy 
]with CVS.  As far as I know, the rest of the developers are, too.  I don't 
]really see a need to switch to anything.

CVS has the advantage of being well known to developers, but I've 
recently tried Subversion, BitKeeper and arch, and I do think arch
might make it easier to integrate patches from various sources.
I'm still testing arch, but if I'm still happy with it in a month
or so I'll volunteer to do an arch gateway. See:
  http://wiki.gnuarch.org/Arch_20and_20CVS_20in_20the_20same_20tree

The basic advantage is that for each feature or bugfix a developer 
can create a branch and any other developer can pull that branch into 
their own branch and merge them into the tree with 'tla star-merge'
So I could pull in a patch from John Poet and Doug Larrick into my 
latest and greatest and see if they work together, and I wouldn't have 
to unpatch their earlier versions of the same patch first. Arch is also 
good at caching the latest tree which makes diffs faster and lets you 
do more when the network connection flakes out. It also has some 
features that CVS lacks such as allowing patches to add/delete/rename 
files, which are nice but not essential.

]> 2) Better project management.
]>      - Better branch management
]>      - Better bug/issue tracking
]>      - Better documentation
]Good luck.  I've been trying to get people to help out with that since I 
]started this project.  Haven't had a single offer that was actually followed 
]up on.

I second that, many have offered to work on documentation, none have 
followed up on it yet...

-- Daniel


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