Re: conversion to git

[Bernd Jendrissek]

On 9/20/07, Bob Friesenhahn <address@hidden> wrote:
> Very interesting.  If various projects flee from CVS to some other
> version control system then I hope that the projects I am involved
> with flee to the same system rather than many different systems.

AFAICT the fleeing is mostly to exactly two options: Subversion or
git.  The only other one I've even seen mentioned is mercurial on the
GCC list (which has itself switchedfrom CVS to Subversion a while
ago).

> I have looked at Subversion and find its installation to be rather
> unwieldly, requiring many additional packages to be installed of
> particular versions.

Ugh yes, don't remind me.  I gave up last time I tried to build it
from source.  Git OTOH was *relatively* easy (for a
non-autoconfiscated package), even on my ageing Debian Sid box.  I had
to disable the asciidoc stuff though.  Oh and all those reports of
people running a git command and wondering if it really happened
because the prompt returned so quickly?  They're true.

> Subversion seems to use a rather exotic
> implementation rather than a fairly simple one like CVS.  It seems
> that GIT has the advantage in this regard.  I tried 'arch' but it did
> not compile on my machine at the time so I never looked back.

Git wants libcurl, which I didn't have.  I'm unsure of how easy that
is to install.

> Maintainers of portable software need portable version control
> systems.  The version control system client needs to put up no fuss
> when compiled on a "bare" machine (often a porting target, for extra
> challenge) so that it is possible to get going right away.

IMHO Git passes the "no fuss" test; Subversion fails.

> A package which installs just one stand-alone command is much easier
> to deal with than a package which installs 132 different inter-twined
> commands.

You don't HAVE to install all 132 git-* commands.  just plain "git" is
just hardlinked to all those different names.  If you're happy to
ditch the git file manager, you can just intall 'git' and access its
subcommands as "git log" / "git pull" / etc. instead of "git-log" /
"git-pull" / etc.

P.S. Here's a nice-ish crash course for CVS devotees to adapt to the git lingo:

http://geda.seul.org/wiki/geda:scm#how_do_i