Re: bzr send workflow

[Bojan Nikolic <bojan@bnikolic.co.uk>]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org> writes:

> Bojan Nikolic writes:
>
>  > As already much discussed, the problems people are experiencing are
>  > basically due to many people trying to write (in some way) to the
>  > same sftp://bzr.sv.gnu.org/srv/bzr/emacs/trunk/ location via the
>  > dumb sftp protocol.
>  > 
>  > There are many ways around this, but one I did not see mentioned
>  > (maybe I missed it) is using the bzr send command to send merge
>  > "bundles" via email. This is the way bzr development itself worked
>  > while I followed it, and I've used it on some of my own projects
>  > too. I was always very impressed how well it worked.
>
> I don't think this helps much.  The underlying problem for Emacs (and
> other bzr-based projects on Savannah) is that Savannah doesn't want to
> allow bzr+ssh until the Savannah admins understand the security
> implications.  The Bazaar development workflow involves at least one
> separate server application not yet available on Savannah (the pqm
> Patch Queue Manager), and I can't imagine that installing that would
> be any easier than upgrading already installed software to use a smart
> server over ssh.

My idea was that in the first instance the bundles would be merged by (a
select group of) people. These people would either have a fast
connection to the bzr.sv.gnu.org, or even better, a login to the machine
hosting this branch, in which case the merges could be done without any
network traffic. It is a bit of an overhead but it takes only a few
seconds to do a merge of bundle from Gnus.  This has the additional
benefit that most changes would have four eyes on them before being
committed to the trunk.

To reiterate the main benefit though: accepting "bzr send" bundles means
that people on even the slowest connections can contribute easily and
efficiently. I've used these satisfactorily over slow GPRS connections.

Best,
Bojan


-- 
Bojan Nikolic          ||          http://www.bnikolic.co.uk