git mirror available

[Pavel Roskin]

Hello!

I have converted the CVS repository to git and put it to my site.  I
just wanted to see if there will be any problems with it.  I cannot
promise that I will keep the mirror up to date.  Still, it could be
useful for development, such as bisecting bugs, working with several
patches and even sending them to the list.

To get the repository, use this command:
git-clone http://git.80211libre.org/grub2.git

It could be initialized for use with StGIT by running "stg init" in the
resulting grub2 directory.  Please don't use cogito to check out - it's
obsolete and incompatible with the new packed reference format.  Use
gitk, tig or qgit to view the history.

I have verified that the repository can be cloned from Cygwin using git
distributed as part of the Cygwin collection.  StGIT and gitk worked
fine.

A nice surprise is that git-cvsimport works with the CVS server just
like an anonymous client.  This means that everybody can make a git
mirror.  The cvs-authors file is available (in UTF-8) here:
http://git.80211libre.org/grub2.git/cvs-authors

Now let's consider the issues found so far.

git tools assume that the first line of the comment is a short summary,
but many committers used the first line of the ChangeLog instead, which
lists the date and the name of the committer.  There is no way to
generate summaries automatically.  This means that looking at the
complete description or the changes in ChangeLog would be more useful
than looking at the first lines.

To be fair to git, it's not an information loss.  The summaries are just
not there due to different commit conventions.  If the new commits have
more git friendly comments, they will look better in the git history.

Generally speaking, switching to a distributed development model will
make ChangeLog obsolete and will put more emphasis on the commit
comment.  That's not git specific at all.  Linear logs don't work with
non-linear development.

Distributed development will probably require that generated files (like
"configure") are not kept under version control.  Otherwise, changes to
them will have to be kept in separate patches that would need to be
excluded from sending to the list.  That's too complicated.

To sum up, switching to git takes more than just changing the commands.
It takes changing some practices as well.  But it doesn't look painful
to me.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin