[lively-kernel] Code reorganization in Webwerkstatt - please check your js files

[Fabian Bornhofen]

Hi Marko,

great to hear from you!

On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 6:54 AM, Roeder, Marko
<Marko.Roeder at student.hpi.uni-potsdam.de> wrote:
> To be honest, I liked it the way it was before all of the changes ;-). It seems like we changed a lot in the last couple of days and some of those decisions appear to me as if they only had to be done because previous changes introduced new challenges and problems :-/.
We're not afraid of changes, are we ;).

> Furthermore I had a problem with moving the "kernel" to kernel/core/CodeBase/... from the beginning because I could see that what the "codebase"/root was before (e.g. .../webwerkstatt/) does not include all the additional folders referencing modules, etc. (e.g. users, projects, ...).
> I do not think that it is hard to extract the core files (for a release, a clean installation, a new project, ...) and we have done that preparing release zips, dumps, etc. So why not keep all those files in the (tree) structure we have had so far?
I maintain a (acually a few) local installations of LK. It's a real
pain to keep these in sync with Webwerkstatt if you want to avoid a
complete checkout of webwerkstatt. You could check out /lively/,
/lib/, .. as separate modules, but not single files.
Moving the core parts to a single subfolder allows you to check them
out as a submodule and just type "svn up" in a single location.

> In addition to that I do not (yet) see what all the openness to several VCS will bring for the project, in other words: Why does LK suddenly have to not only "run" with SVN but with GIT, Bazar, and so on? Still the decision to use SVN was not only about the version control system to use but a deep technical decision that influenced a lot of the LK architecture. And to be honest, do you know one (or more) projects that do have/maintain/use more than one VCS?
Webwerkstatt still uses SVN and I think this should be our upstream
repository. After all, this is where most of the development happens.
If we have mirrors for the core, that's a nice side effect.
On the long term, however, I think it's a good idea to have a VCS that
allows us to do atomic commits, especially with a growing user base.
To me, this is second (besides not being distributed) major drawback
of mod_dav_svn with autoversioning.
You sure can do atomic commits with SVN if you develop locally and
then push everything back using command line svn. And then again, that
only works if the core (pretty much the only place where this is
REALLY important) is in a single svn module.

> So, these are my thoughts and I know, we are all working towards a good and practical way to do releases and how we can sync different branches/projects/installations that are based on Lively's "kernel". But maybe we should step back for a moment and look at what we have and what might be a reasonable, small step (or two, or three, ...) to reach this goal!
It really looks like a lot of people have put a lot of thinking into
these things lately, which is good.

Fabian