[sakai2-tcc] Sunday / Thursday TCC meeting notes

[Noah Botimer]

Hi everybody,

I just wanted to send a message in my place for the day. The three agenda items that have the most importance for me are, in my eyes, really one. These are:

	1. Project/release organization
	2. SVN commit rights
	3. Subversion-Git(Hub) transition.

As I mentioned in response to Steve, I plan to do a bit more non-email writing; I just haven't had a chance to do it yet. But let me summarize my perspective:

If we are striking out and changing the above items, I would like to do it systematically, rather than ad hoc and incrementally. I think we have the tools to iterate on some ideas with an interested portion of the community without burdening their daily efforts much or inflicting a series of changes on the whole community.


My main concern is doing a lot of work that changes the day-to-days for people without vetting the changes collaboratively. The proposals land in the rough areas of:

 1. Module organization / POMs (paths, externals, dependencies, versions)
 2. Build/deploy process (commands, artifacts, manual steps)
 3. Contribution model (itemized SVN access vs. fork-and-pull requests)


I personally think that we need to keep focus on the forest as well as the trees here. A strawman future:

    1. We could work up a flattened contributor model in Git(Hub) using pull requests, allowing reviewers to commit the patches to the authoritative SVN trunk, then updating the mirrored master.
    2. We could use Gradle builds in the existing modules as well a skeleton prototype structure to bridge to an eventual module layout without disrupting the Maven builds.
    3. We eventually declare bankruptcy on our SVN rights and Maven POMs by switching over fully once the ideas prove out.


I am not declaring that this is the right path -- I am only suggesting that a bunch of little changes to what we have risk a longer and more painful path in the long run than some parallel/inline experiments and a well-timed, well-documented transition. I think we will be better served by being comprehensive than being hasty.

For the record, Spring has done a similar transition recently with good success.

https://github.com/SpringSource/spring-framework/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md
https://github.com/SpringSource/spring-framework/wiki/Gradle-build-and-release-FAQ
https://github.com/SpringSource/spring-framework#building-from-source

Thanks,
-Noah