Re: conversion to git

[Eric Blake]

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According to Bob Friesenhahn on 9/19/2007 9:52 PM:
> 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. Like most
> people here, my hands are already full with development of projects and
> learning new version control systems loses valuable time.

One of the benefits of git is that it comes with git-cvsserver.  In other
words, even with git as the repository, you can still use your CVS client
to access the repository.  Yes, it's less efficient, but it works, and the
repository is still accessible on platforms where git has not been ported
yet.  git-cvsserver can even support write access, although gnulib chose
to use the cvsserver in read-only mode (to commit to gnulib, you now have
to use git).  Also, git has a growing user base, with some good
documentation on learning common commands for those used to CVS-based
workflows.  Again, I'm not turning CVS read access off, rather, I have a
goal to phase out CVS write access.

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

One of my criteria for git was having it work on cygwin; a year ago, that
was not the case.  Yes, git is not yet as portable as what autoconf
targets, but on the other hand, you don't need git to use autoconf; you
only need it if you are contributing autoconf patches.  And in case you
really can't get git to work, you can still generate patches using the CVS
interface, mail them to this list, and rely on others with git access to
do the actual commit.

Ultimately, I like distributed version control better than single-access,
which already knocks a number of systems out of the running (for example,
CVS, subversion, monotone) - there is just too much benefit for having the
potential of the entire history on your local machine, with no network
traffic involved to search the history.  It's a new mindset, and the git
documentation admits this, and even offers suggestions on how to use git
in a manner consistent with the old CVS mindset of a central repository
[it is likely that most GNU projects on savannah (autoconf included) will
stick with the CVS mindset of a master repository for some time to come].
 Between the remaining vcs options, one of the reasons the GNU development
has seemed to switch to git, rather than mercurial or bzr, is the
responsiveness of the git development team, and the fact that support has
been added on savannah.gnu.org to host git projects.

- --
Don't work too hard, make some time for fun as well!

Eric Blake             address@hidden
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