[Difx-users] Update from DiFX workshop #15, including SVN to git plans {External}

[Adam Deller]

Hi difx-users, difx-developers,

Greetings from sunny Socorro, where the developers portion of the 15th
workshop is in full swing!  We've had an enjoyable and jam-packed week with
many new users and a lot of useful development activity.


We found out at the meeting that not everyone was aware of the DiFX slack
space: feel free to come and join at
https://join.slack.com/t/difx/shared_invite/zt-2366i72c6-57VqiqLIMDt46X59wEqOxg.
We have some active channels on there regarding GPU-DiFX and the git
migration that may be of interest to some, potentially many people.

One of our primary goals this week was to finalise the migration plan from
our current SVN repository to a new git repository, facilitating some more
modern integration testing, documentation, bug reporting, and coding
practices.  After some lengthy discussions on Tuesday and Wednesday, we
have converged on the following approach:

1) SVN will be frozen to new commits soon but will remain accessible, and
will be the method by which old tags (released DiFX versions) are accessed.
I.e., we won't bring every old tag and branch across to git.

2) We will use the "git flow" methodology for branching and merging once
the conversion is complete.  Simple instructions for the difx-developers
will be distributed - we're aiming to follow a path which is not too
dissimilar to current practices, and there is some early information
further down.

3) The current DiFX-2.8.1 will form the basis of the stable "main" branch
on git.

4) The current DiFX trunk will form the basis of the active development
"dev" branch on git (so will have the same function as trunk does on SVN
now).

5) Those two branches will be the only two copied over to git. They will
have full history, however, we intend to remove a small number of large
binary files that had been inadvertently included over the years to
minimise the size of the git repo and maximise speed.

6) We intend to freeze commits to SVN on the end of Monday, September 18
(i.e., 4 days from now).  At that time, Shaoguang will take a day or two to
complete the migration. Once that is complete, I will email difx-users with
information on how to check out the latest stable version from git, and
difx-developers with information on how to check out, make branches,
commit, and merge under git flow (but for anyone that wants to take an
early peek, see
https://www.stxnext.com/hs-fs/hubfs/Feature%20Branch%20Development%20(a.k.a.%20GitFlow).png
for the idea; the first half of the page
https://www.gitkraken.com/learn/git/git-flow is is also good, with a little
bit of explanatory text as well as a nice diagram.)

So what that really means is that for the users, not much will change
except that in the future you'll check out your releases in a slightly
different way, and hopefully with more and better documentation! For
developers, it means that if you have uncommitted code that is ready for
trunk, please do commit it within the next few days. Anything that is not
committed prior to svn being frozen will just need to be manually merged
later in the git dev branch and then committed via git.

Any questions, please get in touch.

Cheers,

Adam (on behalf of all the devs at the DiFX workshop)

-- 
!=============================================================!
Prof. Adam Deller
Centre for Astrophysics & Supercomputing
Swinburne University of Technology
John St, Hawthorn VIC 3122 Australia
phone: +61 3 9214 5307
fax: +61 3 9214 8797
!=============================================================!
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