Re: [Caml-list] OCaml Forge and Github

[Anil Madhavapeddy <anil@recoil.org>]

On 29 Sep 2013, at 18:13, Dario Teixeira <darioteixeira@yahoo.com> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I have a number of projects hosted on the OCaml Forge (thank you Sylvain!), 
> and the hosting includes the Subversion repository for each project.  It is,
> however, harder and harder to resist the allure of Github, particularly when
> people sending me patches explicitly mention they would prefer to interact
> through it.  I have no complaints about the Forge, though, and I find it a 
> very useful service.  However, I would of course also like to accommodate
> the Github crowd.
> 
> My default approach would be to convert and migrate the SVN repos to Github, 
> keeping on the Forge only the webpage, file releases, and news.  But I'm
> curious: how did other projects deal with this situation?  Is there some other
> approach the community would find preferable?

For me, the lure of GitHub is the level of automation and scripting that it
permits, so I prefer having all my packages on there simply so I can write
code to take care of release tedium (using the self-referential bindings at
https://github.com/avsm/ocaml-github).

There's also the network effect of using other people's tools that are built
on top of it.  For instance, I've just been playing with continuous integration
and refreshed Mike Lin's scripts; this lets you hook up executable tests that
run in the cloud (for free, for open source projects) in minutes of work:

http://anil.recoil.org/2013/09/30/travis-and-ocaml.html

An interesting feature of Travis is the post-success hook, which can be used
to trigger further work (such as deeper OCamlot tests, for OPAM).

You may be able to handle the Forge interaction through that mechanism, for
instance by doing an SVN commit from the Git push hook. I'm experimenting
with building ocamldoc for every package and pushing it to the gh-pages
branch (so that it's published on GitHub pages automatically on every push).

Incidentally, the scripts that convert the OCaml SVN to Git are available:
https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml.org-scripts/tree/master/vcs-sync/svn-ocaml

They are a bit smarter than the average SVN->Git convertor and create real
git branches for SVN tags.  This may help you if you wish to migrate from
SVN to Git (even if the Forge supports git, it probably requires this 
conversion process too).

-anil