Re: Merging git history for jws-2020

+1 - thanks Chairs

Mike Prorock
mesur.io

On Fri, Jul 22, 2022, 18:44 Zundel, Brent <brent.zundel@avast.com> wrote:

> The chairs discussed this during our meeting today.
> We would prefer that the CCG and VCWG GitHub repositories remain separate
> and support Orie's plan for initializing this work item.
>
>
> On Wed, Jul 20, 2022 at 7:06 AM Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On 7/19/22 2:41 PM, Orie Steele wrote:
>> > On Tue, Jul 19, 2022 at 12:25 PM Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com
>> >     Can PR history be transferred? Can closed issues be transferred?
>> 'cause that's
>> >     part of the problem as well.
>> >
>> > Yes, and in fact, its best preserved by my recommended approach.
>>
>> We might be talking past each other. I think you might be thinking "commit
>> history", which is different from "PR history". By "PR history" I mean,
>> this
>> stuff and all of the conversations around the PR:
>>
>> https://github.com/w3c-ccg/vc-api/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed+is%3Aopen
>>
>> Issues have a "Transfer Issue" button.
>>
>> PRs have no such button.
>>
>> PR history is important because 1) we use it to calculate who the
>> contributors
>> are at the end (contribution to issue and PR discussion get you
>> authorship),
>> and 2) You can track down exactly where a line in the spec came from (and
>> the
>> discussion that surrounded it) which is useful when anyone is trying to
>> figure
>> out why a particular feature exists in the spec. For example, this
>> discussion
>> around the initial GET and DELETE operations wouldn't show up in a search:
>>
>> https://github.com/w3c-ccg/vc-api/pull/271
>>
>> If the PR history exists in two places, it becomes much harder to do a
>> single
>> search to track stuff down, which adds extra time the Editors must spend
>> when
>> trying to get an idea of where a particular feature/edit came from...
>> which is
>> important when you're trying to find the set of people to include in a
>> discussion around a particular feature.
>>
>> If we just transfer the repo, we keep everything intact.
>>
>> > We did exactly this process for the DID Spec registries, and it
>> successfully
>> > preserved history.
>>
>> It didn't, for example, these 10 issues were not moved over:
>>
>>
>> https://github.com/w3c-ccg/did-method-registry/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aclosed
>>
>> These 89 PRs and the discussions around them weren't moved over:
>>
>> https://github.com/w3c-ccg/did-method-registry/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed
>>
>> IOW, we lost history on a registry that is supposed to track where DID
>> Methods
>> come from and the process around the acceptance of each DID Method.
>>
>> Now, you can argue "Oh, they're still there -- you just have to look in
>> two
>> places"... which is exactly the point -- let's not make things harder on
>> ourselves by splitting history between two repos.
>>
>> > It is a better approach, it preserves history and doesn't break links or
>> > create confusion.
>>
>> I hope the above demonstrates how history is broken when we take the
>> "manually
>> migrate SOME of the history by hand" approach.
>>
>> > I don't like transfering because it blurs the line between the W3C CCG
>> and the
>> > W3C, and I believe it's better to keep their histories and contexts
>> intact and
>> > related...
>>
>> Why do you believe that?
>>
>> > it also keeps the credit in the W3C CCG for starting the work
>>
>> A simple line in the spec would accomplish this as well (as would the full
>> commit history).
>>
>> IIRC, there is a trade-off here -- once we migrate the repos, and Github
>> sets
>> up the redirects, I don't think we can create another repo with the same
>> name
>> in the w3c-ccg (the link will always be redirected). This was a bug in
>> Github
>> a few years ago that they said would be fixed, but I haven't gone back to
>> see
>> if they actually fixed this bug. If they didn't, we'd run the risk of
>> people
>> going to old versions of the HTML spec and getting a 404 (but then, a
>> simple
>> google search would help them find the right URL). We'll need to run this
>> experiment to see if that is still an issue, and if it isn't, we can
>> accomplish everything that you want as well as everything that I want.
>>
>> -- manu
>>
>> --
>> Manu Sporny - https://www.linkedin.com/in/manusporny/
>> Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
>> News: Digital Bazaar Announces New Case Studies (2021)
>> https://www.digitalbazaar.com/
>>
>>
>>
>
> --
> Brent Zundel
> Principle Crypto Engineer - Avast
>