[ncc-services-wg] Pre-PDP discussion: "All published documents and PDPs are maintained with git"

* Sander Steffann

>> All RIPE documents are made available by means of a git
>> repository, both via anonymous pull and via a web interface. The
>> read-only access is open to everyone, RIPE member or not. Within
>> RIPE, this git repository is the canonical place for all published
>> documents. All published documents are copied from it.
> 
> I don't know how useful this is, as RIPE documents don't change once
> they are published. If a revision of a RIPE document is published it
> gets a new number. So I don't think a version control system will be
> useful here.

I can see one particular advantage of using a version control system -
the "git blame" command, which will show when a particular sentence or
paragraph was added or last modified. There's several times I've read
RIPE documents and wondered along the lines of: «Where did this come
from? What was the rationale behind it?» I rarely go through the trouble
to find out.

That said, while I agree that Git is a very good tool, I'm reluctant to
micro-manage the NCC by saying «you MUST use Git» (or any other
particular tool for that matter). The current system can be improved a
whole lot without requiring a version control system, I like to point to
the IETF's tools page, which shows all the revisions of a draft leading
up to its publication as RFC, and where you can generate both in-line
and side-by-side diffs on the fly. One example:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-v6ops-ipv6-cpe-router-09

In any case, for maximum use of any form of version control system,
you'd have to consider that even though e.g. ripe-582 is a new version
of ripe-577 which in turn is a new version of ripe-553 and so on, the
history of ripe-582 alone isn't nearly as interesting as the history of
ripe-582 plus all preceding versions combined. So either the file name
needs to stay the same between versions (unlike today). or you'd have to
import the entire history of the previous version into whatever you're
starting the PDP with for the proposed new version. I don't know if Git
allows for this.

-- 
Tore Anderson