Re: Be ready: We're switching version control systems

[Nick Mathewson <nickm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 08:29:55PM +0200, Juliusz Chroboczek wrote:
 [...]
> This is excellent news.
> 
> > - Better support for offline development.
> 
> This also means that occasional contributors will be able to use the
> RCS.
> 
> A centralised RCS, such as CVS or SVN, segregates contributors into two
> categories: those who have commit rights, and are able to enjoy all the
> nice features of the RCS, and those who don't, for whom the RCS is
> little more than a way to get the latest sources.
> 
> With a decentralised RCS, all contributors are able to use the RCS; if
> you're a non-comitter, you work on his private branch, which can be on
> a different server or simply on your laptop.  When your code is ready,
> you either ask somebody with commit rights to pull your changes into the
> official repository, or you push over e-mail.

Exactly, though I'd like to make an appeal here.  If you are working
on a Tor-related project, the time to get in touch with us and the
rest of the community is probably _not_ when you think your code is
ready to be merged.  Working in the dark like this can lead to
duplicated effort (if you work on something someone else is also
working on), and wasted effort (if your approach, on review, would
have proved to have problems that you didn't see).

Somebody should really expand the "HACKING" document to explain how to
get started enhancing Tor, how to write a design proposal, what needs
a design proposal, what versions are okay for new features vs
bugfixes, how portable the code needs to be, why or-talk is not
or-dev, and so on.

yrs,
-- 
Nick