Re: [boost] [git] [conversion] Schedule and remaining showstoppers?

Subject: Re: [boost] [git] [conversion] Schedule and remaining showstoppers?
From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2013-10-16 08:51:39

On Wed, Oct 16, 2013 at 4:53 AM, Daniel Pfeifer <daniel_at_[hidden]>wrote:

> 2013/10/15 Beman Dawes <bdawes_at_[hidden]>:
> >> ...
> > We are not trying to do a perfect conversion. We are trying to do a
> > reasonably good conversion and then move on.
>
> I think we had a reasonably good conversion at BoostCon 2012.
> Our approach was rejected by the community so we started a new
> approach, this time aiming for perfect conversion.
>
> The new approach looked very promising at first and we made good
> progress. But it has become more complex than expected.
> It is really like Niall wrote: "Every time you think you're getting
> closer to done, another new minefield of subtle issues appears which
> causes more borkage across the whole conversion process."
>
> Here is a quote from Peter Drucker:
>
> A company should build a process that systematically looks at every
> product, every service, every process, every policy, every market with
> the question, "If we weren't doing this already, knowing what we now
> know, would we start it, would we go into it?" If not, how quickly can
> we get out?
>

Wonderful! Yet another example of why Drucker is revered in management
circles.

>
> The answers to these questions are: "No" and "I don't know", respectively.
>

My take on "how quickly can we get out?":

* Declare the conversion software done. Dave and Daniel are off the hook,
although we will need their help if the conversion process stops running
before the cutover.

* The moment 1.55 ships, we make the SVN repo read only. As soon as the
next conversion run finishes, we turn off the conversion process.

* We run a process that checks out all the Boost2Git repos, does the
gitflow branch renaming, and pushes those changes up to the Boost2Git repos.

* At that point the bulk conversion is done. Library maintainers can start
work on their individual libraries. If a problem is discovered in an
individual library's repo, we help that library maintainer resolve the
problem for that library rather than rerunning the entire conversion for
all libraries.

To be able to pull that off, a lot of preparation not involving the
Boost2Git conversion process remains to be done. But we need to be clear
about where we are going before worrying about exactly how we are going to
get there.

Thanks,

--Beman