[RFC] teamGIT bonjour support

[RFC] teamGIT bonjour support

[Abhijit Bhopatkar]

Hi,

After a long pause in the development, i am back to drawing boards for teamGit.

Ever since i adopted git as my preferred version control system for my
teams, I had this tough time keeping up with every one. Of course this
is a GoodThing(TM) since this means pace of development is rather
good. But it has its usual problems of forcing everyone to religiously
publish _AND_ keep rebasing on main branch every so often. Also my
major problem is that we discover conflicts only _after_ a developer
tries to rebase his work, typically (by design) after he has fully
coded and tested a feature.

The current way to get around this is shouting aloud before you start
working on a new feature/file/section.
However    a. this is not scalable
                b. pron to human errors
               c. pron to inhumane erros and after fights ;).

So in this regards, I have on my drawing boards a rough design to
1. Publish the current selected topic trees info on local lan.
2. Keep track of interesting topic branches and add alerts when
conflicts bet. selected trees reach alarming levels.
3. Possibly later add authentication mechanism to restrict access.

I plan to do this on LAN using bonjour service discovery, and rest
completely being handled inside teamGIT running as a daemon(may be in
widely abused systray?). (Git will handle actual fetch/conflict
checking etc.)
On a side note i also plan to generate daily reports and configurable
notifications.

So I ask you people, is there a solution already cooking someplace?
may be something i can integrate with teamGIT? (e.g. bonjour plugin
for git dameon)
Any thoughts or comment?
Am i just too stupid to not manage it with documented company wide policies?

BAIN

Re: [RFC] teamGIT bonjour support

[John Tapsell]

2009/8/28 Abhijit Bhopatkar <bain@devslashzero.com>:
> Hi,
>
> After a long pause in the development, i am back to drawing boards for teamGit.
>
> Ever since i adopted git as my preferred version control system for my
> teams, I had this tough time keeping up with every one. Of course this
> is a GoodThing(TM) since this means pace of development is rather
> good. But it has its usual problems of forcing everyone to religiously
> publish _AND_ keep rebasing on main branch every so often. Also my
> major problem is that we discover conflicts only _after_ a developer
> tries to rebase his work, typically (by design) after he has fully
> coded and tested a feature.

What sort of time frame are you talking about?  How long are your
sprints, or however you partition your work.

I can't help but feel the problem should be solved elsewhere.  Do you
have daily scrums?  Everyone should know, roughly, what everyone is
doing.  If you are using 2-3 week sprints (or however you partition
the time) and everyone is roughly aware of what everyone else around
them is doing, there shouldn't really be so much of a problem.

> The current way to get around this is shouting aloud before you start
> working on a new feature/file/section.

How do you allocate the features in the first place?  At the start of
a sprint?  If so, it should be the person in charge of that that
should see if there are going to be conflicts.  If you don't have
sprints, then how do you divide up tasks?

John

Re: [RFC] teamGIT bonjour support

[Abhijit Bhopatkar]

>> good. But it has its usual problems of forcing everyone to religiously
>> publish _AND_ keep rebasing on main branch every so often. Also my
>> major problem is that we discover conflicts only _after_ a developer
>> tries to rebase his work, typically (by design) after he has fully
>> coded and tested a feature.
>
> What sort of time frame are you talking about?  How long are your
> sprints, or however you partition your work.
>
> I can't help but feel the problem should be solved elsewhere.  Do you
> have daily scrums?  Everyone should know, roughly, what everyone is
> doing.  If you are using 2-3 week sprints (or however you partition
> the time) and everyone is roughly aware of what everyone else around
> them is doing, there shouldn't really be so much of a problem.

Well as i said in informal way we do shout out loud (managers: read as
'daily meetings') when we want to make changes that might conflict
with some one else and i have been blessed with a rather good dev team
who can spot this right, and it works well for now for these short
sprints. However see below for my itch.

>> The current way to get around this is shouting aloud before you start
>> working on a new feature/file/section.
>
> How do you allocate the features in the first place?  At the start of
> a sprint?  If so, it should be the person in charge of that that
> should see if there are going to be conflicts.  If you don't have
> sprints, then how do you divide up tasks?

Yes as i said this generally works.
But and this is a big BUT, this essentially makes the developer the
point of failure (in reporting the conflict). And in my view (exactly
contrary to yours) the problem should be solved else where.

Also we are working on many porting projects which need changes to the
same file but not essentially logically conflicting, which if,
everyone is aware of at the moment the change is made (commited?) is
trivial to resolve.
However when you have 100 such changes at the end of a sprint thats a
problem. Yes git makes it extremely easy to merge i can't even begin
to think about the current style of development in svn deployment. And
we can resolve those conflicts fairly easy. Its just that I have to
depend then on individual's ability to persist through what seems like
million merge conflicts.
And no its not avoidable, we _have_ to do those conflicting changes in
order to keep the pace of development. Its just about reporting them
sanely and quickly which is ok to be done manually, but it pains me
that the info can be available with some tool as well with obvious
benifits of automation.

So the idea is sort of local linux-next style automation for small teams.

BAIN

> John

Re: [RFC] teamGIT bonjour support

[Ben Hoskings]

On 28/08/2009, at 5:02 PM, Abhijit Bhopatkar wrote:

> I plan to do this on LAN using bonjour service discovery, and rest
> completely being handled inside teamGIT running as a daemon(may be in
> widely abused systray?). (Git will handle actual fetch/conflict
> checking etc.)
> On a side note i also plan to generate daily reports and configurable
> notifications.
>
> So I ask you people, is there a solution already cooking someplace?
> may be something i can integrate with teamGIT? (e.g. bonjour plugin
> for git dameon)

You should check out bananajour, it sounds like it might fight the  
bill quite nicely:

http://github.com/toolmantim/bananajour

Written by Tim Lucas, and hacked on by a bunch of us at the Gold  
Coast, Australia Railscamp in May:
http://railscamps.com/

The idea is that for each repo you want to publish, bananajour creates  
and looks after a locally stored remote, that you push to ("git push  
banana master") to publish your work over bonjour.

There's also a web interface at your-machine.local:9331 which shows  
the other bananas that were found (via bonjour) on the network.  
['9331' is for 'peel' :) ]

I'm not sure what the state of Linux support is, since most of us run  
OS X, but I'm pretty sure someone was working on Linux/zeroconf support.

Cheers
Ben Hoskings

Re: [RFC] teamGIT bonjour support

[Ben Hoskings]

On 28/08/2009, at 8:06 PM, Ben Hoskings wrote:

> You should check out bananajour, it sounds like it might fight the  
> bill quite nicely:

I mean, _fit_ the bill. My fingers got stuck in the '*ight' rhythm, I  
guess. :)

Ben

Re: [RFC] teamGIT bonjour support

[Jakub Narebski]

Abhijit Bhopatkar <bain@devslashzero.com> writes:

> So I ask you people, is there a solution already cooking someplace?
> may be something i can integrate with teamGIT? (e.g. bonjour plugin
> for git dameon)

There is gitjour:
  http://rubyforge.org/projects/gitjour
  http://github.com/chad/gitjour

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland
ShadeHawk on #git

Re: [RFC] teamGIT bonjour support

[Abhijit Bhopatkar]

2009/8/28 Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com>:
> Abhijit Bhopatkar <bain@devslashzero.com> writes:
>
>> So I ask you people, is there a solution already cooking someplace?
>> may be something i can integrate with teamGIT? (e.g. bonjour plugin
>> for git dameon)
>
> There is gitjour:
>  http://rubyforge.org/projects/gitjour
>  http://github.com/chad/gitjour

Hmm... almost perfect, except i don't want to depend on ruby to be
installed on the target machine.
Sigh!

BAIN

Re: [RFC] teamGIT bonjour support

[Petr Baudis]

  Hi!

On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 12:32:39PM +0530, Abhijit Bhopatkar wrote:
> I plan to do this on LAN using bonjour service discovery

I wonder why so much emphasis for this? It seems like a nifty
convenience bit, but I don't think making this idea too central is any
good. What if you get a second office at the other end of the world?
What if part of your team is working on a deployment at customer site?
What if part of your team works from home over a VPN?  What if your
team is collaborating over the internet on an open project?  What if...?

That said, it sounds like a great idea to have let's say a post-commit
hook that will start an upload job:

	extbranch="$(whoami)/$(git symbolic-ref HEAD | sed 's#refs/heads/##')"
	pushurl="$(melting_pot)"
	git push --force "$pushurl" "HEAD:$extbranch" >/dev/null &

(untested, +corner cases). On the server side, cronjob or post-update
hook can do the integration testing. The complete setup should be
a matter of few-minutes hack.

Now, it seems totally irrelevant if melting_pot is

	melting_pot() { git config teamgit.meltingpot }

or extra code that tries/caches some local discovery first.


P.S.: It's not clear if you want the information sharing with commit
granularity or less - in that case, things might get rather tricky e.g.
if you add new files and don't git add them until right before you
commit, and the work tree state might be total mess anyway.

P.P.S.: It's not clear if you strive after complete de-centralization of
the service, with no central melting pot. That would seem fancy, but
I think rather useless and hard in practice to arrange your reports
that you want, etc. It's not clear again then if the integration testing
should happen on single machine they all vote on (samba-like), or if
all machines should do integration-testing, and whether of all branches
or only some of them, and how to recognize the interesting branches, and
things are getting very hairy already... Your requirements are too
ambiguous.

-- 
				Petr "Pasky" Baudis
A lot of people have my books on their bookshelves.
That's the problem, they need to read them. -- Don Knuth

Re: [RFC] teamGIT bonjour support

[Petr Baudis]

On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 10:05:30AM +0100, Petr Baudis wrote:
>   Hi!
> 
> On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 12:32:39PM +0530, Abhijit Bhopatkar wrote:
> > I plan to do this on LAN using bonjour service discovery
> 
> I wonder why so much emphasis for this? It seems like a nifty
> convenience bit, but I don't think making this idea too central is any
> good. What if you get a second office at the other end of the world?
> What if part of your team is working on a deployment at customer site?
> What if part of your team works from home over a VPN?  What if your
> team is collaborating over the internet on an open project?  What if...?
> 
> That said, it sounds like a great idea to have let's say a post-commit
> hook that will start an upload job:
> 
> 	extbranch="$(whoami)/$(git symbolic-ref HEAD | sed 's#refs/heads/##')"

Thanks to sitaram, now I know that probably the best way is:

  	extbranch="$(whoami)/$(git describe --contains --all HEAD)"
	
(But now you *really* need to check if HEAD is a heads ref first or you
will push out to something totally bogus.)

P.S.: Heh, I would never guess what that git describe command already
does, talk about intuitiveness. ;-) (Of course, when you know exactly
what the switches do, it totally makes sense.)

-- 
				Petr "Pasky" Baudis
A lot of people have my books on their bookshelves.
That's the problem, they need to read them. -- Don Knuth

Re: [RFC] teamGIT bonjour support

[Björn Steinbrink]

On 2009.11.20 10:12:09 +0100, Petr Baudis wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 10:05:30AM +0100, Petr Baudis wrote:
> >   Hi!
> > 
> > On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 12:32:39PM +0530, Abhijit Bhopatkar wrote:
> > > I plan to do this on LAN using bonjour service discovery
> > 
> > I wonder why so much emphasis for this? It seems like a nifty
> > convenience bit, but I don't think making this idea too central is any
> > good. What if you get a second office at the other end of the world?
> > What if part of your team is working on a deployment at customer site?
> > What if part of your team works from home over a VPN?  What if your
> > team is collaborating over the internet on an open project?  What if...?
> > 
> > That said, it sounds like a great idea to have let's say a post-commit
> > hook that will start an upload job:
> > 
> > 	extbranch="$(whoami)/$(git symbolic-ref HEAD | sed 's#refs/heads/##')"
> 
> Thanks to sitaram, now I know that probably the best way is:
> 
>   	extbranch="$(whoami)/$(git describe --contains --all HEAD)"
> 	
> (But now you *really* need to check if HEAD is a heads ref first or you
> will push out to something totally bogus.)

Hm, I'd go for:
$(whoami)/$(git rev-parse --symbolic-full-name HEAD | sed s,refs/heads/,,)

gives the shortname of the checked out branch head, or HEAD when you're
on a detached HEAD.

Bjoern ;-)