Re: [Gnu-arch-users] beginner needs advice

[John A Meinel]

address@hidden wrote:

> Hello,
>
> (beware, that mail is a bit long)
>  
[...]

> Now come questions :)
> Is configuration management the right solution to manage such a thing ?
> Should each section of a grimoire be a sub-project ?
> Development, as you must have understand, is centralized, even if
> gurus have their own local repository (of their section, the whole
> grimoire or sorcery according to their job). What would be the way to manage
> rights and all for r/w access cleanly ? (meaning adding or removing someone,
> modifying his rights is not a pain)
> Currently, gurus have to make by themselves spell commit into devel,
> and then integrate that change to test. How would you do that
> automatically ? Use of commit hook to tag the changed spell (usually a guru
> makes a change in a spell, then commit) ?
> I must admit i'm a bit lost when it comes to organize such a thing with
> with tla. I use it regularly with very small projects, not something that big.
> Any advice is welcome.
> Kind regards,
> Laurent.
> <to be continued...>
>
>  

I can't say I followed everything perfectly, but I think I got the feel 
for it. And I would say "yes" configurations are what you want to use to 
manage this. At the top-most level you would use a distribution category 
"dists--sorcery" which would keep the configurations. Inside that you 
would have a configuration which builds all of sorcery, and then 
whatever grimoires go along with it.
I'm not sure what the easiest way to prevent people from committing to 
certain portions (categories) of the archive, but I think you can do it 
with group permissions and sticky bits on the server.
So each sub-project gets it's own system group, and anyone with write 
access is in that group. Guru's just need to be in all the groups.

I think there would also be possibilities for using a PQM (patch queue 
manager). So a developer works on their own tree, and when they are 
ready, they tell the PQM (with an email) that it should merge the 
changes from a specific branch.

Alternatively, you probably could set the PQM up to monitor specific 
branches, and whenever they change, to merge it into the main tree.

If you use a PQM, you can set up all sorts of rules about who is allowed 
to submit a change to a given branch. It might make your work easier. 
People can always have whatever personal branches that they want (of 
anything they can read), but if they want to get it committed into the 
main tree, it has to go through the PQM.

The only thing I can think of, though, is that arch currently doesn't 
keep track of the person who made the changes that you merged. (Say I 
make a change, and give it to you to merge into your tree, that shows up 
as though *you* made the change.) So trying to do stuff like "annotate" 
becomes more difficult with a PQM. Though since a PQM only commits pure 
merges (it doesn't edit anything itself), it would probably be possible 
to customize annotate to look at what patches were being merged.

I hope I didn't tell you more than you wanted to know,
John
=:->

signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature