Crossroads I/O is a fork of the ZeroMQ project | Hacker News Reader

Crossroads I/O is a fork of the ZeroMQ project

crossroads.io

71 pointsdochtman39 comments

From the FAQ:

Why do you not accept pull requests?

Pull requests can change while being reviewed. This makes it impossible to ensure that the code being merged is the same code that has been reviewed and discussed, which compromises integrity of the codebase.

If only Git had some sort of cryptographically secure token that would uniquely identify commits, and make tampering evident.

It does. But to my knowledge, no one submits pull requests as a set of SHA1 hashes.

What is a pull request if not an ordered list of SHA1 hashes and comments?

GitHub pull requests are tracked by a base and a head commit. Usually, base is master, and head is some feature branch. This allows the pull request on GitHub to pull in new changes to the commit as a discussion forms around it.

So in that sense, he is correct. There's no way to ensure that clicking the merge button is indeed merging what I think it's merging. Now that I type that, we could easily just include the latest SHA in the form and check that. Problem solved!

Alternatives to this are:

* Merge manually from the command line. This is typically what we do at GitHub. * Request that people file pull requests with a SHA as the pull request head. This makes it impossible to update the pull request with future commits. * Don't use pull requests.

> we could easily just include the latest SHA in the form and check that

Please do! I've accidentally merged the wrong code on a few occasions.

While we're making feature requests:

* The order of commits on the "Commits" tab sometimes shuffle around, especially when a history contains a merge.

* Would be nice to let me annotate code (with comments) before "Send Pull Request". Sometimes I want to make some comments to guide a reviewer.

* Browser-push updates of comment threads!

* Let me comment on a file, not just a particular line, particularly empty ones.

* Discussions are often hard to follow via email because insufficient or misleading context is included.

* 100 other things I can't think of at the moment :-)

I love GitHub; it's critical to the way we work. Thanks!

Wow, this is exactly the list of improvements IMO that would make GitHub a perfect code review platform. Especially push on comment threads.

Thanks for the clarification. I, for one, think that would be a great reliability/security measure.

That was my intention, I almost always merge from the command line, except for tiny & trivial pull requests, like documentation. Its hard to run the tests through the Github web UI.

It does seem crazy to merge without testing if you're following that sort of procedure.

So GitHub pull requests point to the current head of a branch and not a specific commit? Tying a pull request to a specific commit (implicitly, not necessarily with new UI) seems like it would solve the problem.

Specifying the latest SHA as part of the merge would solve the trust problem. As other people have mentioned, allowing a final "review and fixup this patch" step before merging would also be useful for some workflows; this is what happens when you merge on the command line.

That leaves another major problem for us (the XS developers) which is that we actively encourage all development discussion and code review to be done on the mailing list where everyone involved sees it.

With GH pull requests this discussion gets fragmented into separate threads on the various pull requests.

Further, in my workflow, pulling in new changes to be committed into a pull request makes that pull request a new (version of) the original. See for example how Linux patches are discussed; you post an initial version, it gets discussed, you rework it, post a v2, and so on. At each point in time it is clear what exactly is being discussed.

Personally I have some other philosophical issues with GH that might be fun to discuss, get in touch by email if you're interested.

For anyone that still cares, this has been tweaked. If you attempt to merge a pull request that has changed since you loaded the page, it'll require you to re-review the pull request.

Most pull requests are the url of a repo and the name of a branch. Without a sha1, those aren't tamper-proof.

Another option is to make pull requests for signed tags, which build on GPG trust; or to GPG-sign a pull request email containing a sha1.

- https://lwn.net/Articles/473220/

- http://git-blame.blogspot.com/2012/01/using-signed-tag-in-pu...

(I think psadauskas is being sarcastic.)

So I can't find the reason why this project exists instead of just contributing to 0MQ directly.

From the web site (http://www.crossroads.io/faq):

```Why was Crossroads I/O forked from ZeroMQ?

The contribution and trademark policies of the ZeroMQ project were, as of March 2012, incompatible with our long-term goals.

Who is behind the fork?

The main work on the fork was done by two of the original developers of ZeroMQ, Martin Sustrik and Martin Lucina, with help and advice from other members of the ZeroMQ community.'''

I've read it, and yet not understood which are those incompatibilities in the goals

"To grow such an ecosystem the project must be fully vendor neutral, and implement a liberal (e.g. Linux-style) trademark policy allowing use of the trademark for third party distributions of the software, as well as for plug-ins and extensions."

Ah, a Centos/Red Hat thing.

As I understand it (as a regular on the ZeroMQ and Crossroads mailing lists), the reasons are as follows:

1) Trademark issues - the original developers of ZMQ have been prohibited from using the ZeroMQ trademark and, thus, from making official releases.

2) The new ZeroMQ contribution policy[1], in which pull requests are merged without review and then later reverted/enhanced if necessary, is seen as incompatible with the goals of some of the lead developers. These developers prefer a more rigorous review policy.

There are more reasons, but from what I can tell, those are the main ones that haven't fully been covered here.

[1]: http://www.zeromq.org/docs:contributing (see "Philosophy").

If you want more background to what led up to our fork of ZeroMQ, read the flamewar on zeromq-dev from February carefully hidden in a "C++ assertion" thread at http://lists.zeromq.org/pipermail/zeromq-dev/2012-February/0..., or from http://lists.zeromq.org/pipermail/zeromq-dev/2012-February/0... which relates directly to the trademark question.

I noticed there's a compatibility library with 0mq. What are the technical changes that require a compatibility library?

This seems to imply there are API differences, rather than just the same code with different development policies going forward.

The compatibility configure flag seems to be used to also install the crossroads library as libzmq.so.

I'd say “personal differences” (regardless of the deal about trademarks and code review), but it still surprises me; I thought the zmq developers were a tight-knit bunch. Maybe the drama manifests itself in more extreme ways because they know each other so well, but it does seem dysfunctional.

I agree with you. When you fork a project, there better be a good reason. And when there is a good reason, there's no reason to be vague in the explanation. (and I can't think of a vaguer explanation than what they write)

Giving an example of a problem solved by the fork would help, though I'm not sure a solid example of a goal not possible within 0mq can be found based on the project goals.

Looks like a move from GPL to LGPL.

I had assumed that zmq was BSD licensed to begin with - so I've learned something.

That can't be it, as 0mq is also LGPL. From the footer of zeromq.org:

   ØMQ is free software licensed under the LGPL

And in every source file:

   0MQ is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
   the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by
   the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or
   (at your option) any later version.

As I have some investment in the 0mq ecosystem, it would be nice to know what this means in the long run for that project.

According to [1] ZeroMQ is licensed under LGPL with static linking exception.

[1] http://www.zeromq.org/area:licensing

You can't do that without the consent of every contributor. At least not legally.

Not exactly. The zmq library is already LGPL. It's the plugins and examples that are GPL. That might be a potential reason crossroads I/O was created -- to start an ecosystem of plugins that are LGPL too.

source: http://www.zeromq.org/area:licensing

I think this email from the guy in charge of 0MQ now is fairly clear: http://lists.zeromq.org/pipermail/zeromq-dev/2012-February/0...

On a related note, developers can be mean

from reading the email thread it appears this is the main issue:

zeromq is looser about what ends up in master. They view master as sort of a global staging area, and what ends up in release branches is viewed as stable/vetted code. As a result, master can be quite unstable.

The people that forked wanted a more stable master, with lots of code reviews before patches end up in master.

The real question for me, since I very recently brought 0MQ into my project: should I stay with that or switch to Crossroads? I don't want to get stuck on the lagging branch.

My vote is for the first one that can handle TLS over a special type of connection pair.

Can someone please elaborate ? I very recently started an investigation (proof of concept) into zeromq for my team. What are the long term implications ?

Probably none. You can still use ZeroMQ. If Crossroads ends up better than ZeroMQ, you can switch.

Especially as the ZMQ API is so simple. init/send/recv. That's about it.

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