Moving Django to GitHub: the postmortem

http://www.holovaty.com/writing/django-github/

by googletron • 14 years ago

101 24 14 years ago

zem2• 14 years ago

is 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 since nothing further will ever be pushed to it, those scripts are now tracking an increasingly out-of-date repo.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• 14 years ago

Off 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.

zem2• 14 years ago

but that is now getting an old version of django. is that really what is wanted?

wpietri2• 14 years ago

coughretrospectivecough

A postmortem is what you do when you try to understand the cause of death: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmortem

</nitpick>

adrianh• 14 years ago

Actually 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• 14 years ago

> 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

goblin893• 14 years ago

Still 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.

eblume• 14 years ago

Definitions 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.

wpietri2• 14 years ago

Yeah, 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• 14 years ago

I would have liked them to move to bitbucket.org because it was built with Django.

elithrar• 14 years 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).

__alexs2• 14 years ago

BitBucket supports Git repositories...

rbanffy• 14 years ago

I really can't see the difference.

Both offer similar feature sets. If I want to keep my fork on Bitbucket, it's easy.

richardlblair2• 14 years ago

I'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.

richardlblair2• 14 years ago

Also, please don't end up like the mongodb github project. They have 70 pull request, 0 closed.

Moving Django to GitHub: the postmortem

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