README.md (was: migrating to GitLab)

[Urs Liska]

Hello all,

although I have admittedly been pretty much silent about all this I
would like to ask about getting access to the LilyPond repository in
the new place as well. My user name there is urs.liska.

One thing I noted while setting up my account is that we don't have a
README.md in the root directory. Is this by any conscious decision or
simply because nobody has done it or started a discussion yet?

I think having such a file as a first - auto-formatted - introduction
on a repository's entry page is a common expectation for any visitor of
this kind of platform. Not finding general information on the front
page would be irritating for most visitors (and potential
contributors).

This is to start a discussion of what should be on that page before
writing one and starting a Merge Request.

I think a README.md should include:

 * A general description of what LilyPond is, with a reference to the
   website and a direct link to the manuals
 * An initial overview of how to become a contributor with
    * a description of the used programming languages
    * a list of included support tools with their programming languages
      (e.g. musicxml2ly)
    * a link to the CG
    * maybe a quick reference about what we expect Merge Requests to
      look like

Best
Urs

Am Freitag, den 08.05.2020, 08:57 +0200 schrieb Jonas Hahnfeld:
> I haven't heard further objections which, for me, means we are going
> with GitLab. If you don't agree, now's your final time to speak up.
> Otherwise I would like to tackle the migration rather soon to take
> advantage of the new opportunities :-)
> 
> This leads me to some final considerations:
> 1) I'm going to disable write access to SourceForge when starting the
> migration. Otherwise the two copies will diverge over time, leading
> to
> confusion for everyone. As all old issues are retained, including
> their
> ticket numbers, this shouldn't be a problem: We can just continue
> working on them and preferably close the issues over time ;-)
> 
> 2) I'm not attempting to migrate outstanding patches from Rietveld.
> As
> we'll most probably have some during the switch, they need to be
> resubmitted. This shouldn't be a major deal as everybody should be
> working with branches already. Right?
> 
> 3) The idea is to have the "main" repository at GitLab, next to the
> issues and merge requests. This leads to the question what to do with
> Savannah because git is distributed anyway. I first thought about
> only
> pushing "important" branches and tags to GitLab (master, stable/*,
> release/*). Switching platforms would actually be one of the few
> opportunities to do so - in particular tags are hard to get rid of.
> However most of us are probably going to reuse their local
> repository,
> just updating the URL. While GitLab has options to prevent pushing
> certain refs, that's probably not a great idea. So I guess I'll just
> push an identical copy to GitLab unless somebody has a better
> proposal.
> 
> Ultimately we can talk about cleaning up the Savannah repo and only
> keeping the "important" branches there. This could for example be
> coupled with automated mirroring, which GitLab supports out-of-the-
> box. 
> I won't look into this for the initial switch though, so just make
> sure
> you're not pushing conflicting commits there...
> 
> 4) I expect the script to take 9-10 hours for the issue migration
> which
> I plan to run over night (European time). This is primarily for post-
> processing tasks at the end which are better done when fully awake.
> So
> no issue tracker during this time, but that's probably justifiable.
> 
> ---
> 
> And now to the most important task: picking a date when I'm
> available.
> I could do: Sunday evening & Monday; Tuesday & Wednesday; or
> Wednesday
> & Thursday.
> 
> Cheers
> Jonas