New developer concern - why a not Git

Hi Till,

That all makes sense. However, was my patch complex ;-)?

I think the one thing about ISPConfig compared to modern web systems is the UI. I have exactly the same problem on my project, fighting that now possibly more than 50% of development effort is expected to be on UI design rather than functionality, and that newer systems make more use of what can be done in a post-IE7 world due to a lack of legacy decisions. And in fact, I think cPanel, and other big control panels with old roots, have the same problem. That kind of thing, and themes, don't require such intimate systems knowledge.

I'd say it's an opportunity to you. You don't need to merge in the forks if you don't wish to (on a case-by-case basis). With my project I actually have people sponsor development, and to my surprise someone recently was willing to pay me to merge someone else's patches in. So I think it could work for you. You need to get the communication right of course.

 

No, the usability patch that I did that was integrated recently (you'll see what I'm referring to if you search my posts). It could have been partly done as a theme, but made more sense as something put in for all themes to inherit.

I suppose I can see your point, if you're very happy with svn, and it's rare for you to easily accept external contributions without a lot of work.

Maybe instead of such a drastic change then, someone here would volunteer to manage the ISPConfig website, make it tidier, explain processes more clearly, install an SVN browser, migrate the issues to a newer system with no data loss, that kind of thing.

 

@markc: push your theme to GitHub and post the link. Maybe I can help because I can not really follow your problem description

@till: What you describe is exactly what GitHub is good for. You define a upstream in the forked repo (of the contributor) and make your fix/new library/whatever and push it to your GitHub account.
* If the changes are minor or can be confirmed to work visually you send a "pull request" -> core dev can comment on that and decline or merge the changes with one click on GitHub
* If it is somewhat bigger of a change you can test it while development continues. You test and rebase your fork continuously with the development branch of the upstream (in this example the master branch of ISPConfig)

This way changes by "untrusted" contributors are always visually checkable by everyone (I often comment on commits or pull request to point out mistakes or possible enhancements) and can be changed by the contributor in this process.

I know you do not like the discussion about GitHub and I would understand if you stop adding to it

about the theme: can push it to the SVN on completion although I do see a theme (since the theme switch was integrated) for ISPC as a standalone package. Maybe you could add it to the official apps & addon repo

 

till: It's up to you guys if you want to help to improve the ispconfig project or work against it by splitting the development without contributing back.

The irony of that comment is, as I said, that it would be easier for me to fork the project on Github and continue by myself than to have to deal with antiquated and disjointed project tools. Just my opinion but if you truly want more community input then using Github is a clear path forward to enable many more contributions. Your guarded approach tends to stifle innovation and experimentation and even if I, or anyone else, did, or has, forked ISPConfig then there is nothing stopping anyone from cherry picking the best parts back into "upstream". Of course if you are not using Git and/or Github then it makes it that much harder to cherry pick between separate and different repository types.

Personally I have no intention of ever using Subversion ever again. No point, Git/Github totally destroys any incentive to bother. As I said, and say it again, it would be easier and less time consuming for me to fork the entire ISPConfig project to Github and continue by myself than to deal with... crazy stuff from last century.

till: Why is it not so easy to contribute?

Because you are not using Github. How can you possibly compare "sending a patch (set) via email" to a one-click fork of the entire project and then a one-click pull request that can then be reviewed and commented upon using the included issue tracker which very nicely sends emails to all involved, and replies to those emails go back to the issue tracker for all to see.

I appreciate you going into the complexities of dealing with the codebase in your previous comment, it is indeed a very large and complex project, so much so it deserves a decent project work flow to match and assist that complexity. The right way to manage contributions is via branching. You could have a "testing" branch for just that and then anything that survives scrutiny in that branch gets merged into a "next" branch which would be like RC release quality . When the folks that like fiddling with the latest codebase indicate all is well then next is merged into the master branch which could be the canonical single point of release quality code. No real need for versioned release tarballs. Any problems and just roll back some troublesome commits in the master branch that somehow managed to get through the testing and next branches.

On top of that, every man and his puppy can experiment in as many local branches as they care to, go completely nuts and try anything out locally, go wild, and when something sticks that could be useful upstream then... click on pull request and bingo, some new code starts on a trajectory towards the master release branch. Most of the problems you cited could be far better managed using Git (via cheap branches) and Github just doubles, even trebles, the benefits of using Git.

 

That is my concern with SVN. everyone is working in the (unique/one) trunk and the code should work somewhat all the time for testing purposes.
Fork or branch in Git and you can screw around with it however you want. And use a branch for everything like fixes or new features.

@markc: Although I have a decent dislike for SVN I think your tone is getting a little bit too harsh. Think about that- I know most here a no native English-speaker but keep the discussion civil - Just a remark before anyone gets too annoyed with the topic

 

cfoe: push your theme to GitHub and post the link. Maybe I can help because I can not really follow your problem description

This is getting off-topic for this thread, but forums will be forums. I solved my problem of being able to split out the sideNav so I could put it anywhere I want. Yes, I'll push it to Github soon. This gives me most of the layout changes I was after in dashboard/templates/dashboard.htm...

Code:

  <div id="dashboard-top">
    <tmpl_loop name='dashtop'>
      {tmpl_var name='content'}
    </tmpl_loop>
  </div>
  
  <table class="fixed">
    <tr>
      <td>
      <div id="dashboard-lhs">
        <tmpl_loop name='leftcol'>
          {tmpl_var name='content'}
        </tmpl_loop>
      </div>
      </td>
      <td>
      <div id="dashboard-rhs">
        <tmpl_loop name='rightcol'>
          {tmpl_var name='content'}
        </tmpl_loop>
      </div>
      </td>
    </tr>
  </table>

http://www.howtoforge.com/forums/showpost.php?p=293148

 

cfoe: Although I have a decent dislike for SVN I think your tone is getting a little bit too harsh.

Yes, good point, I certainly do not mean to offend anyone. Apologies to anyone who feels so.

Just today I pulled up a live server with ISPConfig. It took 15 minutes to actually install and reboot and then a couple of hours to get some initial users and DNS set up. It's the first CP I've ever used (aside from swearing at Plesk for a few months last year) and it was so cool to use a browser instead of the 100 bash scripts that I normally use. The only real problem I struck was missing libnss libs in a jailkit chroot so I could <ahem> use git and pull some scripts from Github.

I was going to use Zpanel (primarily because it's Github based) but the codebase is somewhat over engineered and not as mature as ISPConfig so it looks like I'm in for the long haul now and that partly explains why I am so passionate about using Github. I want to see this codebase improve as quickly as possible and, aside from the people that actually do the work, Github is the next best accelerator from cranium to the real world.

 

till: You should be able to add it in the jailkit settings under System > server config as additional dependency.

Thank you, spot on advice. This works on Ubuntu 12.10 so that id shows the user/group names instead of just the uid/gid which causes ssh to not work back out from the server (hence git, scp and rsync as well)...

Code:

cd /etc/jailkit
cp jk_init.ini jk_init.ini.orig
sed -i 's/lib64/lib\/x86_64-linux-gnu/g' jk_init.ini
diff -u jk_init.ini.orig jk_init.ini
--- jk_init.ini.orig    2013-03-06 22:35:04.502405510 +1100
+++ jk_init.ini 2013-03-06 23:16:06.070051327 +1100
@@ -2,12 +2,12 @@
 # this section probably needs adjustment on 64bit systems
 # or non-Linux systems
 comment = common files for all jails that need user/group information
-libraries = /lib/libnsl.so.1, /lib64/libnsl.so.1, /lib/libnss*.so.2, /lib64/libnss*.so.2
+libraries = /lib/libnsl.so.1, /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnsl.so.1, /lib/libnss*.so.2, /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnss*.so.2
 regularfiles = /etc/nsswitch.conf, /etc/ld.so.conf
 
 [netbasics]
 comment = common files for all jails that need any internet connectivity
-libraries = /lib/libnss_dns.so.2, /lib64/libnss_dns.so.2
+libraries = /lib/libnss_dns.so.2, /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnss_dns.so.2
 regularfiles = /etc/resolv.conf, /etc/host.conf, /etc/hosts, /etc/protocols
 
 [logbasics]
@@ -47,7 +47,7 @@
 
 [sftp]
 comment = ssh secure ftp
-executables = /usr/lib/sftp-server, /usr/libexec/openssh/sftp-server, /usr/lib/misc/sftp-server, /usr/libexec/sftp-server
+executables = /usr/lib/sftp-server, /usr/libexec/openssh/sftp-server, /usr/lib/misc/sftp-server, /usr/libexec/sftp-server, /usr/lib/openssh/sftp-server
 includesections = netbasics, uidbasics
 devices = /dev/urandom, /dev/null

And FWIW the System -> Server Config -> Jailkit chroot app section currently has basicshell editors extendedshell netutils ssh sftp scp groups jk_lsh but extendedshell already includes basicshell editors so they could be removed. Of course I added git as well.

Woops, no, I take that back, git is still missing from the jailkit chroot even though I added git to the Server Config section for jailkit. SSH works back out from the server though.

 

till: Btw, we decided to give github a try.

You won't regret it and I'll be more than happy to help where I can

https://help.github.com/articles/importing-from-subversion
https://github.com/blog/626-announcing-svn-support

Update: I see you have https://github.com/ispconifg ... excellent. You may want to consider turning it into an Organisation.

Re using git clone https from within a jailkit chroot also requires curl (with a lot of dependent libs) and at least /etc/ssl/certs, also /dev/random, and /usr/lib/git-core/ is missing from the git section of /etc/jailkit/jk_init.ini. This is mainly a note to myself to remind me what's missing next time I add a new user.

 

the svn2git ruby gem is the only good way.
I did it here: https://github.com/Foe-Services-Mirrors/ISPConfig3
but I did not remap the users like described here:https://github.com/nirvdrum/svn2git#authors

If you like I can do the proper export. You need to send me a ssh cert you set as deploy key on github for the organization.

 

Currently I am running the transfer for the ajaxplorer team.
Will be up shortly here: https://github.com/ajaxplorer/ajaxplorer-core

 

Kind of offtopic, but I thought that these links may be helpful:

http://buildamodule.com/video/chang...a-scalable-git-branching-model-called-gitflow

is about how to deal with branches, releases etc. (great model!)

and http://www.git-legit.org/ is a small wrapper around some git commands (useful for beginners).

 

More links. There is a fairly complete free video here...

http://vimeo.com/37408017

the original article about "gitflow" is...

http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/

and the above authors gitflow shell scripts...

https://github.com/nvie/gitflow

I prefer "testing" instead of "develop" and "next" instead of "release" but the idea of using the master branch as a stable rolling release system is golden. Aside from using branches to support evolving code to production quality the point I like the most is that over the years the latest canonical target to fetch from can be a single persistent URL that never changes, ie; no version number tarballs that become redundant within a year hanging around in google searches. Of course one can still provide "legacy" versioned tarballs tagged from git but it doesn't have to remain the primary distribution method. Using a single git master source can lead to more dynamic and automatic ways to deploy production services in ways that are not really possible with static tarball snapshots or even versioned distro packages. Below is a simple but good example of what I mean with dynamic update possibilities...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hv4hwgQO9xI