Feature Request: Fork script repos if they're specified

[sjl]

If would be nice if we could put something in the text on vim.org that would tell the bot to fork a given repository here on GitHub instead of mirroring. Something like:

Official repository: http://github.com/sjl/gundo.vim/

[bronson]

That's true. I would use it for http://github.com/bronson/vim-trailing-whitespace

Any ideas how it would handle these situations?

• A script is scraped from vim.org, then its author inserts the redirect. What happens to everyone who has cloned the original repo?
• author removes redirect from script's description. Do we go back to using the scraped vim.org repo?
• script author used -f to force some changes. do we force our pull and expect everyone who has cloned our repo to force their pulls? (hopefully not, but I'm not sure what else we could do)

[MarcWeber]

I posted a mail to the vim_use mailinglist talking about how vim-addon-manager handles it. It has a policies "no-vcs" "prefer-vcs" and "prefer-www.vim.org"

Maybe we should try to maintain one source of "VCS" repos only rather than duplicating it. vim-addon-manager keeps the list in vim-addon-manager-known-repositories. Its written down as vim dict but this could change.

[bronson]

#5 suggests using an -addon-info.txt file to specify the official repo.

[bronson]

After further discussion, I've come to agree that the third issue above is not a problem. The script author takes full responsibility for doing sane things like tagging and not forcing pushes. No problem.

I'm still not sure how to handle the schism between mirroring and forking (what happens when an author wants to convert a mirrored repo to a fork, do we notify everyone who's watching the mirror? what about converting back?). Also, how do we keep the forks up to date? It needs some more thought. I don't think I'll be getting to this any time soon.

[bronson]

Just a quick note... I think I have a solution to this issue. Putting the infrastructure into place now, might see something in Jan or Feb.