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Moving Django to GitHub: the postmortem
- zem 14y agois it really valuable to keep the svn repository up for scripts that do automatic updating? since nothing further will ever be pushed to it, those scripts are now tracking an increasingly out-of-date repo. the other point of view is that there are servers that the admin has had a reasonable expectation of being able to set up and let run itself, but those servers shouldn't be pulling from anyone's svn repo anyway.
- yuvadam 14y agoOff the top of my head, here's one (somewhat) common use case that can break: pip install -e svn+http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/trunk#egg=django It's definitely reasonable to keep the old repo up, for this case, and others.
- wpietri 14y agocoughretrospectivecough A postmortem is what you do when you try to understand the cause of death: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmortem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmortem </nitpick>
- adrianh 14y agoActually I checked with the dictionary before posting, because I had that same concern. (I was a newspaper copyeditor for a while.) Postmortem can mean "any analysis following an event." It's not just for death.
- molecule 14y ago> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmortem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmortem "Post-mortem (disambiguation)" => "Postmortem documentation, a technical analysis of a finished project." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmortem_documentation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmortem_documentation
- goblin89 14y agoStill arguably there's an unhappy connotation, which is better avoided in cases involving any controversy. TBH I first thought something went wrong during transition to GitHub when noticed the headline on HN. However, I never did professional copy editing, and indeed it's a nitpick compared to the occasion. Great news and hopefully this will help Django development.
- batista 14y ago>Still arguably there's an unhappy connotation, which is better avoided in cases involving any controversy. It's a well known, and extensively used manner of speaking. There is no controversy --nor should we aspire to avoid "all controversy" by going into laughable measures like censoring stock standard phrases.
- goblin89 14y agoIt's probably my non-native English then. I didn't realize it's such a common wording, thanks for pointing out. Just sounded a bit odd. By controversy I mean the matter of Django transition to GitHub that IIRC was a subject for discussions for a long time.
- batista 14y ago>It's probably my non-native English then. I didn't realize it's such a common wording, thanks for pointing out. Just sounded a bit odd. A, no problem. I'm a non-native English speaker myself. It's so known a use that it's even in the dictionary: Post Mortem: 2. Informal An analysis or review of a finished event. Funny aside: in my language we have a similar half-joking phrase. When someone asks "How did it go?" after you've done anything that you're uncertain about it's outcome (a job interview, exams, your book getting published, etc), a common answer is "The autopsy will show us".
- eblume 14y agoDefinitions notwithstanding, I tend to prefer the term 'AAR' (After Action Report). I had a manager in an early campus IT job that had been in the Marines, and he enforced a strict mandatory-AAR policy for anything even remotely complex. It's really a fantastic idea and something I fully intend to use in every capacity that makes sense going forward. It doesn't make much sense as part of the software design flow, but it absolutely could (and probably should) be a tool in any deployment protocol. My AARs usually read pretty much like this blog post, more or less to the T, although we emphasized what we would do differently in the future more.
- wpietri 14y agoYeah, I think it's an excellent practice. I get the metaphorical use of "postmortem", but think "after-action report" (for the document) and "retrospective" (for the meeting) better capture the flavor of what a good one looks like. And like you, I think the most valuable part is what to do differently next time. The way I work them into the software design flow is just to do them regularly, with varying granularity. We do one every Friday afternoon with beers for the last 30-60 minutes of the day. Normally we discuss whatever interests us most about the week past. But a couple of weeks ago one of the engineers suggested we do one covering the whole year, and it was great. Lots of interesting observations.
- tetomb 14y agoI would have liked them to move to bitbucket.org because it was built with Django.
- elithrar 14y ago> I would have liked them to move to bitbucket.org because it was built with Django. But Mercurial itself wasn't (although it was written mostly in Python). I think this is a good example of taking the pragmatic choice (GitHub) over the ideological choice (Bitbucket).
- __alexs 14y agoBitBucket supports Git repositories...
- mryan 14y agoThat's mostly irrelevant. A lot of people are not using Github just because it supports git - the network effect is one of the key drivers in choosing Github.
- __alexs 14y agoCertainly but that wasn't on OPs list of reasons to use it :)
- dalore 14y agoLooks like it was: > Why Git/GitHub, as opposed to Mercurial/Bitbucket or some other system? Because it's very well-made, and it's where the people are. Where the people are would imply because of the social aspects.
- rbanffy 14y agoI really can't see the difference. Both offer similar feature sets. If I want to keep my fork on Bitbucket, it's easy.
- richardlblair 14y agoI'm thrilled and excited to see this transition. I'm also very grateful for all the work the Django team does. I really love the framework as a whole. I hope the Django team can fully utilize the benefits of using github, and further decrease the resistance to contributing (through pull requests). With this change bugs like #17144 wouldn't haunt me for months on end, because I'd just fix it.
- richardlblair 14y agoAlso, please don't end up like the mongodb github project. They have 70 pull request, 0 closed.
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