Re: Remove lily-git?

[James Lowe]

On 03/06/2020 21:25, Karlin High wrote:
> On 6/3/2020 3:14 PM, Jean Abou Samra wrote:
> > There is a discussion at 
> > https://gitlab.com/lilypond/lilypond/-/issues/1012
> > about the future of lily-git.Basically, I think that it no longer 
> > makes sense to keep it now that we switched to GitLab.
>
> I remember seeing this thing bring in over 500MB of dependencies on a 
> Debian Linux system. And I was thinking, "If that's the only piece of 
> TCL in the whole LilyPond ecosystem, there has GOT to be a way to 
> avoid having this."

I am not sure that is correct, lily-git is just a set of python commands 
with a Front End GUI (for the likes of me) that made sure that you had 
set your git repo correctly and could easily download $LILYPOND_GIT. It 
also forced you to set your git user and email.

Lily-git in and of itself was tiny and needed hardly anything to run 
(wish lily-git.tcl).

The 500MB of dependencies was, I expect, for dblatex et al. That we 
needed for doc building at the time but lily-git only cloned the repo 
(and allowed a button to hard reset - again for idiots like me).

I am a bit older and wiser now, but even so git is still a terrible 
'ecosystem' not made much better by the gitlabs and githubs of the world 
(I have the joy of having to interface with both as a non-developer). 
That said, yes we don't 'need' lily-git, however I'd like to give a 
hat-tip to the few devs that kept it going so I could do my work. If it 
weren't for lily-git (and at the start 'lily-dev' - still less faff than 
containers and jails BTW for non-devs) I'd have not been able to easily 
contribute to this project and may have simply given up having to learn 
the terrible interface that is git cli with all the breakages of master 
we had at the start of when I joined.

James