Re: [eigen] Bitbucket migration

Dear Eigen,

I feel like I've given enough time for someone else to speak up about this but haven't seen this commentary. There is a reason that Eigen hasn't migrated to git earlier and it is also the same reason that there are 6 year old PRs waiting in queue and not closed out or commented on... Eigen is not well.

Eigen Curators, you have not listened to your audience, you have not accepted good, hard, work to keep your library alive and improved; you have not kept up with the times. Simply put, you have let opportunity pass Eigen by for more than half a decade. Literally for the past 5 years no one outside of a few maintainers has done anything for Eigen becuase PR's don't get accepted and change is not embraced.

Please don't let this chance get missed. Migrate to git, start accepting good work, embrace a fresh start. And most importantly, don't only let 5 maintainers do all of the work. If you cant do that, you will only see less activity, more forks so people can get what they want, and less useage of Eigen as a package, with more fragmentation and worse results. This has been the case for Eigen since 2015.

This is not meant to be negative, only meant to be honest retrospective. This is a very god chance for Eigen to see a brighter future than it has. It's dying right now, but that can be changed. I think this will be my last email to the community in this forum but I will watch from afar.

Thanks for everything!

--
Respectfully,

Mark Sauder

c: 801.698.8786

On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 10:04 AM Gael Guennebaud <gael.guennebaud@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

To prepare the migration from bitbucket, I started to play a bit with its API to see what could be done.. So far I've quickly draft two (ugly) python scripts to archive the forks and pull-requests. Since this is a one shot for us, I did not cared about robustness, safety, generality, beauty, etc.

You can see them there : https://gitlab.com/ggael/bitbucket-migration-tools and contribute!

** Forks **

You can see the summary of the fork script there: http://manao.inria.fr/eigen_tmp/archive_forks_log.html

The hg clones (history+checkout) represents 20GB, maybe 12GB if we remove the checkouts. Among the 460 forks, 214 seems to have no change at all (according to "hg out") and could be dropped. I don't know yet where to host them though.

This script can be ran incrementally.

** Pull-Requests **

You can find the output of the pull-requests script there: http://manao.inria.fr/eigen_tmp/pullrequests/

There is a short summary, and then for each PR a static .html file plus diff/patch files, and other details. For instance, see: http://manao.inria.fr/eigen_tmp/pullrequests/OPEN/686/pr686.html

Currently this script cannot be ran incrementally. You have to run it just before closing the respective repository!

Also, this script does not grab inline comments. Only the main discussions is archived. Those can be obtained by iterating over the "activity" pages, but I don't think that's worth the effort because they would be difficult to exploit anyway..

** hg to git **

As discussed in the other thread, if we switch from hg to git, then all hashes will have to be updated. Generating a map file is easy, and thus updating the links/hashes in bug comments and PR comments should not be too difficult (we only have to figure out the right regex to catch all variants).

However, updating the hashes within the commit messages will require to rewrite the whole history in a careful order. Does anyone here feels brave enough to write such a script? If not, I guess we could live with an online php script doing the hash conversion on demand.. I don't think we'll have to follow such hashes so frequently.

cheers,
gael