Re: improving our workflow with better tools - let's test things.

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling]

On 21/10/13 11:11, David Kastrup wrote:
> Now it's rather hard to do a proper balance of the merits: basically we
> are not aiming for a "I could discipline myself into using xxx" verdict
> but rather for "this will definitely make things quite easier for me in
> the long run" for a majority of existing and potential contributors.
>
> Now testing a setup is, in a way, sort of an intellectual challenge,
> costs energy, and one is understandably proud if one masters such a
> challenge and does not want this work to go to waste.

Well, it depends on the overall outcome.  There's no shame in coming to the 
conclusion "OK, I spent a lot of time mastering that tool and in so doing I 
proved definitively that it doesn't work as well as other stuff I know."

I may be very critical of Lilypond's existing tools, but I'm not going to try 
and push you towards an inadequate development environment just because I spent 
time trying to get it to work.

> But in the end, of course we are interested most in those experiments
> which ended up not challenging at all, at least from the user side.
>
> I'd rather have people try out five tools in a rather shallow fashion
> and report back their relative impressions than have five different
> people involve themselves deeply with a particular setup.  That way we
> lose the focus on "easy for the casual user" and lose the comparison.

Casual impressions of GitLab: it seems to offer broadly the same scope of 
functionality as GitHub (it's much more feature-complete and user-friendly 
compared to Gitorious).  There are lots of little ways in which it is less 
user-friendly than GitHub; none of them are showstoppers, but any of them would 
be annoying to someone used to GitHub workflows.

One single example: if you rebase and force-push a branch, open merge requests 
won't automatically pick up on the new code; you have to manually edit the merge 
request.  It's two mouse clicks -- click "Edit", click "Save changes" -- but 
that's two mouse clicks you don't need in GitHub.

It's a promising tool but not a perfect one, and it's playing catch-up with the 
state-of-the-art.