Moodle developper community or moodle.org

Moodle developper community or moodle.org

by Pierre Pichet -
Number of replies: 19

Although I understand that we need to migrate to GIT community developping process which enhance community working, I did not like the way things are done on moodle.org.

I am just a little part of the more than 270 peoples that help moodle being what valuable e-learning interface that is used in many large institutions like wy own Université du Québec at Montréal where I am teaching chemistry since 1969.

I understand that we must migrate ot GIT but I do not understand the way moodle.org has done the process.

When as a collaborative  community, you withdraw peoples from the collaborating process in which they are part for many years, the minimum to do, it to warn them of the necessity to stop their access to the old interface and to offer a new way to continue to collaborate to moodle developping.

I am just waiting for such an email with a real moodle doc reference to how to continue working for  developping moodle

Pierre Pichet

 

"we won't have a list of official developers anymore for access ... I was debating with myself if we should just make the logs public anyway ... what do you all think?" (http://moodle.org/mod/cvsadmin/view.php?conversationid=6341)

In my annual report as a professor, being able to refer as moodle developper is necessary to my future contribution to moodle code .

 

 

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In reply to Pierre Pichet

Re: Moodle developper community or moodle.org

by Patrick Pollet -

I support Pierre's remark about the strange treatment of external developers that contributed to Moodle's success  and extend  it to Moodle administrators in charge of keeping their production versions  up  to date.

CVS mirrors of the weekly builds that we use are no longer updated so we missed the patches cited in the new fancy  Recent changes log pages .

It stopped on  1.9.10+ (Build: 20101208) for Moodle 1.9 , so we miss few changes as stated in
http://git.moodle.org/gw?p=moodle.git;a=log;h=refs/heads/MOODLE_19_STABLE


and on 2.0 (Build: 20101214) so we miss changes stated in
http://git.moodle.org/gw?p=moodle.git;a=log;h=refs/heads/master

The least we would have been to warn Moodle administrators ( for exemple by an eMail  similar to the security warnings we receive periodically) that git mirroring to CVS what not yet functional and when it will start. You guys cannot expect all institutions using Moodle to switch to git for simple maintenance operations.

Another angry (ex) Chemistry professor ...


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In reply to Patrick Pollet

Re: Moodle developper community or moodle.org

by Oleg Sychev -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Plugin developers

Yes, it seems that in their over-excitement on new technologes and processes, HQ people somewhat forgot about humans involved.

Another troubled programming teacher/Moodle admin/external developer, wondering how many time it would be when Moodle 2.0 (or 2.1 or 2.2) would be really worth upgrading too.

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In reply to Patrick Pollet

Re: Moodle developper community or moodle.org

by Eloy Lafuente (stronk7) -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Moodle HQ Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers

Hi Patrick,

if I'm not wrong the problem (out of sync) with 19_STABLE has been already fixed and it points properly to 20101214 too.

And, since then, no more commits have been performed to git, so nothing new has arrived to (now mirroring) CVS.

If I'm not wrong the mirroring is ready and awaiting and HQ will be running its first executions manually to see that everything goes ok (specially things like WEEKLY tags and friends that need special love so everybody can continue using the old update ways).

Regarding the phrase extracted by Pierre from HQ chats... I just want to put it in context because, or I'm wrong, or we were talking about a lot of things at the same time (chat records, various overlapped discussions...) as we use to, crazy guys. And it was one question / thought in the air, nothing decided afaik, and something to discuss with YOU (at least IMHO). Just don't extract any conclusion from that context.

Finally, about humans, who cares! I'm an automata programmed to ignore them always and, if possible, infringe them as much damage as possible. So, be warned, you will lose the future, in fact, you've lost it already! evil clown big grin

Ciao smile

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In reply to Eloy Lafuente (stronk7)

Re: Moodle developper community or moodle.org

by Pierre Pichet -

Thanks for the reply Elroy,

I am going south ( Dominican republic) for the next 2 weeks and I expect that many things will be set out when I return.

I am changing all my interface and editor to be ready for GITwhich should give us a better way to collaborate to solve specifics bugs or new development.

We should benefit of the GIT better revieming process and as a non professional programmer I am at ease with the new process.

We all worry about the workload of the primary reviewers like yourself even with the high efficiency and competence you have shown.

My remarks are to warn HQ to not loose the links with the developper community: in french " maintenir le sentiment d'appartenance à la communauté Moodle"

Pierre

 

 

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In reply to Eloy Lafuente (stronk7)

Re: Moodle developper community or moodle.org

by Patrick Pollet -

Hi Eloy,

No the problem of 'out of sync' is not fixed at least with 19_STABLE.

The latest cvs update I did against eu.cvs.moodle.org:/cvsroot/moodle
still gives me a version.php dated 1.9.10+ (Build: 20101208) . So I am missing the fix for MDL-21554 given below  (from the link ' Recent changes log ' :

 


11 days agoMDL-21554 MNet: fixed SQL usage to check a record existence
commit | commitdiff | tree
David Mudrak [Thu, 9 Dec 2010 09:33:32 +0000]
MDL-21554 MNet: fixed SQL usage to check a record existence

The solution backported from 2.0 and independently suggested by Penny,
too.

and for Moodle 2.0 the last one is dated 14/12/5010

This is my last commit to CVS. Goodbye old friend - you've served us well. master
author Martin Dougiamas <martin@moodle.com>

Tue, 14 Dec 2010 07:39:48 +0000 (07:39 +0000)

 

Do you mean that nothing was committed to git since 5 days ? Strange isn't it...

Cheers.

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In reply to Patrick Pollet

Re: Moodle developper community or moodle.org

by Iñaki Arenaza -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

Do you mean that nothing was committed to git since 5 days ? Strange isn't it...

Strange... but true! smile

The first commits to integration.git are from today. And they haven't reached moodle.git yet (not till they are reviewed, and approved by the right people).

Of course, developers have committed lots of things to their local repositories in the meanwhile smile

Saludos. Iñaki.

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In reply to Patrick Pollet

Re: Moodle developper community or moodle.org

by David Mudrák -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Moodle HQ Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Plugins guardians Picture of Testers Picture of Translators

Do you mean that nothing was committed to git since 5 days ? Strange isn't it...

Patrick, that is expected behaviour. In the pull model we use now, the changes are reviewed first (on Mondays) and QA tested (on Tuesdays) before they land in the official moodle.git repository (on Wednesdays). Developers (even HQ ones) do not push anything directly into moodle.git or integration.git. We all just publish our topic branches somewhere and then ask the integrators for the review and accepting the patches (PULL project in tracker.moodle.org tracks these requests).

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In reply to David Mudrák

Re: Moodle developper community or moodle.org

by Patrick Pollet -
Ok I got them today from read-only CVS repo of Moodle 2.0. So I just have to change my script to run on thursday night wink

As far as Moodle 1.9 is concerned, I still got nothing new since 08/12/2010. This is due to the fact that my scripts were checking out MOODLE_19_WEEKLY branch. It looks like that now I have to check out MOODLE_19_STABLE once a week where version.php is indeed dated today as 20101222...

Are you planning to also git sync MOODLE_19_WEEKLY or this branch is meant to diseapear ?

Thanks and Happy Holidays.
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In reply to Patrick Pollet

Re: Moodle developper community or moodle.org

by Tim Hunt -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

I think (from developer chat) that MOODLE_19_WEEKLY not being updated was just an oversight.

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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Moodle developper community or moodle.org

by Petr Skoda -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

Ah, right - no CVS tags are updated any more automatically. This should decided before the next PULL cycle.

The merged tag is not useful any more. Do we still need the weekly tag? It would be pointing always to the latest version.

Please note there are also no tags in git repository because git does not like moving tags (we were moving the tags a lot in CVS before). David proposed to reconstruct only the major release tags in moodle.git.

Petr

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In reply to Petr Skoda

Re: Moodle developper community or moodle.org

by Tim Hunt -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

Well one logical argument is this:

  1. We only maintain CVS to help people who use it to update their site.
  2. Most people who do this will have their update script or whatever geared up to update to the lastest MOODLE_19_WEEKLY tag.
  3. Therefore it makes sense to keep this tag, even if it is always the same as MOODLE_19_STABLE.

Also, if you want a 'moving' tag in git, the right way to do that is actually with another branch. So suppose in git you wanted a MOODLE_19_WEEKLY branch that was always equal to the MOODLE_19_STABLE, or sometimes a little bit behind it.

Then you could create the weekly branch at some point by doing

git branch MOODLE_19_WEEKLY MOODLE_19_STABLE

Then, whenever you want to update the weekly branch to match the latest stable, you would do

git checkout MOODLE_19_WEEKLY
git merge -ff-only MOODLE_19_STABLE

I'm not saying we should do that, only that if we wanted to, this is the right way to do it.

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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Moodle developper community or moodle.org

by Patrick Pollet -

> I'm not saying we should do that ...

Do it the way you want but keep us informed about the name of the good tag/branch.

Plz note that on Moodle download page http://download.moodle.org/ the MOODLE_xx_WEEKLY  tag is claimed to be the best choice ; that is not true anymore with 1.9

Merry XMas.

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In reply to Patrick Pollet

Re: Moodle developper community or moodle.org

by Petr Skoda -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

MOODLE_19_WEEKLY is tagged now.

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In reply to Petr Skoda

Re: Moodle developper community or moodle.org

by Patrick Pollet -

But not anymore in sync today

by a cvs update -dP against MOODLE_19_WEEKLY on  pserver:anonymous@eu.cvs.moodle.org:/cvsroot/moodle

I got in version.php  the build of last week (20110112)

<?php

// MOODLE VERSION INFORMATION

// This file defines the current version of the core Moodle code being used.
// This is compared against the values stored in the database to determine
// whether upgrades should be performed (see lib/db/*.php)

 $version = 2007101591.00; // YYYYMMDD      = date of the 1.9 branch (don't change)
 //         X     = release number 1.9.[0,1,2,3,4,5...]
 //          Y.YY = micro-increments between releases

 $release = '1.9.10+ (Build: 20110112)';     // Human-friendly version name

?>

When doing a cvs update -dP against  MOODLE_19_STABLE on pserver:anonymous@eu.cvs.moodle.org:/cvsroot/moodle

I got the latest (yesterday)

<?php

// MOODLE VERSION INFORMATION

// This file defines the current version of the core Moodle code being used.
// This is compared against the values stored in the database to determine
// whether upgrades should be performed (see lib/db/*.php)

 $version = 2007101591.00; // YYYYMMDD      = date of the 1.9 branch (don't change)
 //         X     = release number 1.9.[0,1,2,3,4,5...]
 //          Y.YY = micro-increments between releases

 $release = '1.9.10+ (Build: 20110119)';     // Human-friendly version name

?>

 

Cheers.

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In reply to Patrick Pollet

Re: Moodle developper community or moodle.org

by Tim Hunt -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

Yes, the two tags were out of synch for a while today until someone noticed and fixed it. Hopefully it won't happen again.

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In reply to Pierre Pichet

Re: Moodle developper community or moodle.org

by Martin Dougiamas -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Moodle HQ Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers

Hi Pierre and others!

Yes, the blame for poor communication rests squarely with me and I apologise.

There's a bit of chicken-and-egg here, as we needed a lot of documentation and support and system configuration and processes to cope with our move from cvs to git, but we also needed people familiar with all this to be able to implement it.   Each needed the other, so it's been a bit iterative development (and continues!).  And all this on top of finishing Moodle 2.0 (phew) and continuing on 2.0.1.

But I could have communicated better, I feel.

Please let me assure you that I have no intention of excluding anyone.   What I mean by the list of official developers is that the admin interface we developed for CVS is now defunct (and sometimes innaccurate), we won't be managing access to the main source code that way any more.   We'll need to find a new way of representing developers on moodle.org by their contributions  - fortunately the git database contains all of this information and we will eventually extract it in a friendly display, perhaps similar to: https://www.ohloh.net/p/moodle/contributors

I'm currently still working on configuring the tracker to improve the workflow there (give me a few weeks!), but even now the way for most people to contribute is to post patches against issues in the tracker.  If you learn to use git then you can just post URLs to your code changes, which is easier for everyone.

If you are a "component lead" (someone who has committed to maintaining a module or plugin) then you will also be able to submit such patches for review (and automatic integration into core Moodle).  Right now you need to file an issue in the PULL project but I see this as temporary - soon all you'll need to do is to press "Request review" in the issue itself.

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In reply to Martin Dougiamas

Re: Moodle developper community or moodle.org

by Oleg Sychev -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Plugin developers

Hi, Martin!

Thanks for you reply. One thing to not forget about developers list: it used to contain people with access to contrib CVS too. And from all I know there are no contrib area in git for now, they should stick to the CVS or have separate git repos. So you'll really need a mix of git and cvs data there (and looking for how contrib people could be mentioned later, if they would have their own git repos).

Another problem with processing logs database as ohloh is that it (with CVS now) only honors people who do actual commits, which are don't necessarily the ones writing code. If you send a patch and someone applies it, credit goes to those who commit it (it is usually credit for developer in the commit message, but it is not extracted to the tables automatically). It may be easier with GIT, when you pull some's change, but it should not be omitted at all IMHO.

P.S. Oh, sorry if formatting is bad, but due to MDLSITE-1136 I have no access to TinyMCE on moodle.org and have to type HTML manually.

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In reply to Oleg Sychev

Re: Moodle developper community or moodle.org

by Tim Hunt -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

One of the nice things about git is that it does keep a record of who originally made a patch, even if someone else later reviews and commits it. For example http://git.moodle.org/gw?p=integration.git;a=commit;h=6cc09234be017ff0b570c6b1898bb8cf151dbe87

So, with git, and the new workflow, places like ohloh will more accurately reflect who has contributed.

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