[cellml-discussion] Proof of concept: using git for specification development

[Bob Gustafson]

Sounds pretty good.

Bob G

On Sun, 2007-11-11 at 15:16 +1300, Andrew Miller wrote:
> Bob Gustafson wrote:
> > Besides git, there is Subversion and a new distributed SCM: Mercurial
> > 
> >      http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/
> > 
> > Being distributed, it may have advantages for cellml, considering the
> > worldwide spread of cellml participants.
> 
> git is also a distributed version control system - the two tools have a
> fairly similar conceptual model in terms of how they work, with a lot of
> flow of ideas between the too tools. I have found git slightly faster
> and a bit more extensible (and with a larger set of commands out-of-the
> box), although one downside is that git front-ends are largely written
> in shell-script, which means you Cygwin to use it on Windows.
> 
> There are tools such as tailor which can probably perform two-way merges
> between the two systems (I haven't tried).
> 
> As a centralised system, Subversion is probably not very usable for
> specification development, because it means you have a single,
> centralised version of the specification (although you could create
> branches, but it still requires permissions be granted to people just to
> create branches), while git / Mercurial / Bazaar can do that sort of
> thing out of the box.
> 
> It is not really the physical location which gives distributed version
> control systems the big win, but rather, the fact that creating an
> official specification requires that numerous proposed changes,
> sometimes mutually exclusive, from people who may not know each other,
> be written up and maintained, and as consensus begins to be reached, get
> merged together to form a final, official specification. There have been
> lots of ideas proposed, but because we don't yet really have good
> processes for going from proposals to the concrete text of the
> specification, nothing has really come out of these proposals yet.
> 
> If we choose to use a distributed VCS system like git for this, I can
> create my personal specification repository, and others can create their
> repositories too (perhaps derived from my version for example), make
> some changes, and then announce them on the mailing list. At this point,
> if the consensus seems to be that these changes should be in the
> specification, I could pull them into my repository. Eventually, when
> there don't seem to be any more changes being discussed, someone who has
> been curating changes accepted by consensus in their repository can
> propose that this curated version becomes the official version, and if
> the community agrees, we will have a specification, complete with the
> merged revision histories from everyone who worked on it.
> 
> Best regards,
> Andrew
> 
> > 
> > Bob G
> > 
> > On Thu, 2007-11-08 at 13:44 +1300, Andrew Miller wrote:
> >> Hi all,
> >>
> >> As a proof of concept, I have set up an unofficial CellML specification 
> >> git at http://repo.or.cz/w/cellml-draft-miller.git . This repository is 
> >> intended to show the concept of using a distributed revision control 
> >> tool to work on specification development, and not to suggest that this 
> >> is necessarily the type of technology which will be used for the actual 
> >> specification development.
> >>
> >> I have used DocBook as the source format in this repository based on the 
> >> preliminary consensus on the CellML discussion mailing list - again, 
> >> this is not intended to suggest that DocBook will be the final format 
> >> used for specification development, but to show the concept, as one 
> >> format or another needs to be chosen even at he proof-of-concept stage.
> >>
> >> git clone git://repo.or.cz/cellml-draft-miller.git andrews-spec-version
> >> cd andrews-spec-version
> >> git checkout -b normative remotes/origin/normative
> >>
> >> You now have a local repository of my unofficial draft version of the 
> >> specification. You can make and commit your own changes locally, and 
> >> potentially push them to your own publicly visible repository (which 
> >> would allow me, or someone else to pull the changes into my version). 
> >> This makes it easy for everyone to keep their own draft versions, and 
> >> merge in changes that they agree with from others. We could eventually 
> >> set up an official git where changes which become widely accepted are 
> >> pushed, and to provide a starting point for people wanting to propose 
> >> additional changes.
> >>
> >> BTW on my system, I can generate the HTML output using:
> >>    xsltproc --xinclude --param section.autolabel 1 
> >> /usr/share/xml/docbook/stylesheet/nwalsh/xhtml/docbook.xsl toplevel.xml 
> >>  >toplevel.xhtml
> >>
> >> The exact command you should use will depend on where things are 
> >> installed on your system.
> >>
> >> Best regards,
> >> Andrew
> >>
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> >> cellml-discussion at cellml.org
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> 
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