[llvm-dev] GitHub anyone?

Chris Lattner via llvm-dev
Tue, 31 May 2016 20:16:16 -0000

> On May 31, 2016, at 12:31 PM, Renato Golin via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at
lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> There has been some discussion on IRC about SVN hosting and the perils
> of doing it ourselves. The consensus on the current discussion was
> that moving to a Git-only solution would have some disvantages, but
> many advantages. Furthermore, not hosting our own repos would save us
> a lot of headaches, admin costs and timed out connections.

Personally, I’m hugely in favor of moving llvm’s source hosting to github at
some point, despite the fact that I continue to dislike git as a tool and
consider monotonicly increasing version numbers to be hugely beneficial.

The killer feature to me is the community aspects of github, allowing people to
get involved in the project more easily and make “drive by” contributions
through the pull request model.  Github also has a very scriptable interface,
allowing integration of external bug trackers etc into the workflow (which is
good, because its bugtracker is anemic).

> 4. We currently host our own SVN/Git, ViewVC and Klaus, Phabricator,
> etc. Not only this incurs in additional admin cost, but it also gets
> outdated, locally modified, and it needs to be backed up, etc. GitHub
> gives all that for us for free.

Yes, it would be great to get out of this business.

> 5. We can still use Bugzilla (and lock GitHub's own bug system), but
> we can also use GitHub's system to manage releases (it's actually
> quite good for that).

If we made this change, I think we should only change one thing at a time:
change source hosting, but not phabricator or the bug tracker.  We could then
discuss moving off phabricator to the github PR model, etc.

> 6. GitHub has automated testing of merge requests, meaning we can have
> pre-commit tests enabled on a set of fast bots, triggered by GitHub's
> own validation hooks.

This works pretty well.  The major problem is with tests that are flakey.

-Chris