Fixing our developer process (?)

[Daniel Lee]

Hi all,

Does anyone have any ideas for fixing our development process? We're spending a lot of time on this... or perhaps that's just my perception.

Here are things we could fix:

- git submodules. Is there a better alternative out there? Is pulling it under one repo going to be better?

- testing. Could this be done faster?

- reviewing pull requests. Can we push things through sooner?

I think we should treat ourselves as users. We should make things better and easier if we can. If we can write a few scripts that make life easier, I think it's worth our time thinking about it a bit and making it happen. Especially with the management of github.

Is anyone lurking a make, bash, Jenkins, travis-ci, or git guru? If so, maybe you can help us out?

Daniel

[Krzysztof Sakrejda]

On Thursday, October 22, 2015 at 9:58:06 PM UTC-4, Daniel Lee wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Does anyone have any ideas for fixing our development process? We're spending a lot of time on this... or perhaps that's just my perception.
>
> Here are things we could fix:
> - git submodules. Is there a better alternative out there? Is pulling it under one repo going to be better?

I hated these initially and kept separate sym-linked repos for a while but once I got the hang of submodules they were great. I think Ben had some pretty clear instructions and turning those instructions into really clear documentation in the wiki would help.

[Allen B. Riddell]

On 10/22, Krzysztof Sakrejda wrote:
> On Thursday, October 22, 2015 at 9:58:06 PM UTC-4, Daniel Lee wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > Does anyone have any ideas for fixing our development process? We're spending a lot of time on this... or perhaps that's just my perception.
> >
> > Here are things we could fix:
> > - git submodules. Is there a better alternative out there? Is pulling it under one repo going to be better?
>
> I hated these initially and kept separate sym-linked repos for a while but once I got the hang of submodules they were great. I think Ben had some pretty clear instructions and turning those instructions into really clear documentation in the wiki would help.

I actually used this submodule alternative, git subtree, for awhile with
PyStan. It only works when you don't need to update the
submodule/subtree.

My sense is that git submodules, like the non-intuitive git command-line
ui, is not ergonomic but it's the best that's available.

That said, I've never been in a situation where I need to constantly
update a submodule. There must be an easy way to do this.

> > - testing. Could this be done faster?
> > - reviewing pull requests. Can we push things through sooner?
> >
> > I think we should treat ourselves as users. We should make things better and easier if we can. If we can write a few scripts that make life easier, I think it's worth our time thinking about it a bit and making it happen. Especially with the management of github.
> >
> > Is anyone lurking a make, bash, Jenkins, travis-ci, or git guru? If so, maybe you can help us out?
> >
> >
> >
> > Daniel
>

> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "stan development mailing list" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to stan-dev+u...@googlegroups.com.
> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Michael Betancourt]

I have to say that I’ve had no problem with submodules when

developing locally.  Propagating updates of submodules to the

repos that depend on them is the biggest pain, but I don’t think

there’s any better way around that than what we have now.

Again, once we have a stable API much of this will become a lot

easier.

[Dustin Tran]

submodules: For Stan users that use the github repo, I notice a lot of them have a difficult time managing subrepos, e.g., Lichi and Jalaj. I like CmdStan’s script where you can just run `stan make-update` and (in principle) everything recursively gets pulled I believe. I always point people to https://github.com/stan-dev/cmdstan/wiki/Getting-Started-with-CmdStan if they want to use, e.g., ADVI. I’ve been slowly adding changes to the wiki so the process gets easier. Pages in the wiki are in general good for this.

Dustin

[Ido Rosen]

In case it hasn't been mentioned: Three existing options for augmenting submodules: repo (Android), CMake externalprojects, depot-tools (Chromium projects), I like the latter two more personally. Another option is git subtrees, which remove submodules entirely from the picture while still preserving histories.