RE: lyp - a Package Manager for Lilypond

[mskala]

On Fri, 29 Jan 2016, Sharon Rosner wrote:
> >...as hosted Git repositories.  I thought that was a dealbreaker, but I
> > tried to give it a fair chance.
>
> Please explain why packages as hosted git repositories is a bad idea. What
> would be a better solution in your opinion?

Version control systems in general are not well-suited for distribution of
software to users.  They significantly increase the level of skill and of
previously-installed software a user needs just to get in the door.  It's
not a good idea to require a client for a much more complicated protocol
just to serve the function adequately addressed by HTTP or FTP.  Git in
particular is an especially poor substitute for HTTP (as compared to other
version control systems) because when used as directed, it requires
transferring the entire previous history of development to anyone who
just wants a copy of the current version, and those people will
disproportionately be the ones least able to make use of the history.
Further comments are here:
   http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/230

That article discusses individual software packages using Git for
distribution.  Building a package manager tied to Git, so that ALL
software it can install must use Git for distribution, compounds the
issues by unnecessarily imposing them on all developers.  Everybody's
required to have public Git repositories, which is a much higher bar than
requiring developers to be able to put files on HTTP servers, an approach
which has served the community well for many years (as did anonymous FTP
before that).  It's not clear what benefit Git provides over much simpler
ways of distributing files; but it has some real disadvantages.

When distributing software requires Git, there's an implicit encouragement
to use Git for the actual development too, and that unnecessarily limits
the tools and organizational structures anyeone can use when building
software that will be installed by this package manager.  Git may be
appropriate for some projects; but a built-in assumption that Git is
appropriate for every project, even in the limited space of LilyPond
development, is harder to justify.

"A public Git repository" is in practice almost the same thing as "a
public repository on Github," and Github in particular has had some recent
issues with both technical reliability and human governance.  They had a
big outage yesterday.  It's not good to put all the community's eggs in
the Github basket.  Requiring everyone who wants to build a package to
build it in a Git repository does not require them to build it on Github,
but does make it a little harder to build elsewhere.

-- 
Matthew Skala
address@hidden                 People before principles.
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/