Re: Migrating to sourcehut - what's missing?

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Theodor Thornhill <theo@thornhill.no> writes:

>>> Is there still interest in moving over to Sourcehut for emacs
>>> development?
>>
>> My understanding is that the answer is yes.  AFAIK, no final decision
>> has yet been taken, but it seems like the consensus is more or less that
>> sourcehut is the most likely candidate to have what we need within some
>> reasonable time-frame.
>>
>
> Good to hear.  I think it would be stupid to decide this without trying
> it properly first anyway.
>
>>> I'm planning to look into this myself a little during the holidays, but
>>> not sure how much time I realistically can spend on this, so therefore
>>> this mail.  Possibly it may be useful if someone other than me wishes to
>>> tackle this over the holidays?  In general they are pretty responsive
>>> over at #sr.ht, so they might be willing to help out a little.
>>
>> I would personally start with setting up a sourcehut instance with a
>> mirror of the Emacs source code.  This would allow you to start
>> experimenting with it to see how it works and what is missing.  In this
>> work, I would specifically compare the sourcehot workflow to what we
>> have now.  If you could make the instance publicly accessible, other
>> interested parties could help with this work more easily.
>>
>
> Workflow-wise I believe it already is established that sourcehut
> supports most if not all aspects of the emacs development workflow,
> modulo the patch-rendering issue when patches are sent as attachments.
> One of the biggest improvements would be to set up builds on patch
> submission, running tests etc.  All of this works properly in Sourcehut.
>
>> Preferably any gotchas when installing should be noted down somewhere
>> (e.g. sent to emacs-devel).
>>
>> Next, I would start looking into those things that are still missing.
>> For starters, they would need to be listed and it should be ensured that
>> there are good feature requests on the sourcehut issue tracker.  If the
>> sourcehut developers are willing to implement those things then great,
>> otherwise it would be obviously be very useful if someone would
>> volunteer to start working on those things.
>>
>
> Actually, I think that running Sourcehut as a local instance wouldn't
> really be necessary for the evaluation, because it is the same code that
> is running on sr.ht.  Apart from the fiddly bits with self hosting, the
> workflow should be the same.  I'd encourage people on this list getting
> their own user there and trying it out, as I think many already have.
> Specifically, emacs-devel would want to use the `meta`, `lists`, `git`,
> `todo` and `builds` subprojects, that is all apart from the `hg` one.

I wonder if it would make sense to have one of the maintainers sign up
there and start a "pretend" official Emacs repo. They could start a
mailing list alongside it that we could play with, and who knows, maybe
that would eventually become the "real" official sr.ht repo.

Eric