[Q-e-developers] Anonymous SVN access [again]

[Lorenzo Paulatto]

Dear Developers,
I am obliged to come back to this argument because the closing of anonymous 
access to the SVN repository is giving me lots of headache.

There are plenty of people in my lab who are developing either on top of QE or 
on separate modules (e.g. XSpectra, El-Ph+wannier, generalized D3) who used to 
compile the SVN version of the code without being QE developers.

Using the SVN version has several advantages:

1. you can keep track of changes one by one, and adapt your code progressively

2. you can check the history of files that have changed (via the online 
interface) and see what has been changed; this is true even for people who do 
not work on the SVN code directly and it is much easier to use than the SVN 
commands

3. you were able to read the SVN commits emails which would alert when some 
big change was going on

I can understand the will to limit the number of people having writing access 
to SVN, in order to keep the code tidy and functional. I can also understand 
the need to keep the SVN private to some extent,  as using an unstable version 
of the code is not recommendable. 

Nevertheless, I used to recommend to students and collaborators to always work 
on top of SVN, knowing that the pain of integrating a code written on top of 
an old static version of QE would be worst than any transient instability of 
the SVN version. Also, as it is usually falling on my shoulders, it may be 
delayed until it is unpractical. I stress, also people working on clearly 
separate projects, often hosted on the qe-forge, are affected as they cannot 
keep the interface between their code and QE up to date.

I know that a GIT repository is supposed to exist somewhere (I could do one 
myself, to be fair), I guess that having access to it can solve the points 1 
and 2; but it is not as readily available as SVN used to be. I would really 
like to have an official, simple way to allow people to access  (read-only) the 
development files and their history.

Access to the commit mailing list would be a plus!

Thank you!


-- 
Dr. Lorenzo Paulatto
IdR @ IMPMC -- CNRS & Université Paris 6
+33 (0)1 44 275 084 / skype: paulatz
http://www.impmc.upmc.fr/~paulatto/
23-24/4é16 Boîte courrier 115, 
4 place Jussieu 75252 Paris Cédex 05