Re: Remove lily-git?

[Urs Liska]

Am Donnerstag, den 04.06.2020, 13:36 +0200 schrieb Jean Abou Samra:
> Hi,
> Le 04/06/2020 à 08:31, James Lowe a écrit :
> > 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
> I do agree with you that Git can be a bit of a trick to learn (at
> least,
> there is a long path before you fully master it). What if right now
> we
> just added a link to some Git graphical client like 
> https://www.syntevo.com/smartgit/?

SmartGit is a great Git client, but it is proprietary, so we can't link
to it (even provided they have a free (lowercase 'f') license for non-
commercial work).
Unfortunately I haven't yet found a Free GUI tool that made me feel
comfortable, so I've always got back to it.

> It doesn't remove the complexity of Git (obviously that's quite more
> involved than lily-git, the target not being the same), but at the
> very
> least, you don't need to bother with a command-line interface.
> 
> lily-git is not going to be usable in an immediate future.
> Anyway, if I had to write something, I would do it in Python as per
> the abovementioned issue (now that recent versions of Python ship
> with tkinter). And as we're still trying to figure out how exactly
> we are going to work with GitLab, starting a new tool right now
> doesn't look like a good idea. So, what I would propose at this point
> is
> to drop lily-git.tcl, as it doesn't provide a value neither for a
> user
> these days, nor for the people that could develop a new tool in
> Python
> in the future; then, depending on how things go on, and if we feel
> the
> need for it, write lily-git.py or whatever. Maybe we could open an
> issue
> to track that. Makes sense?

To me, yes. But I don't think that is too relevant here.

Best
Urs

> 
> Best,
> Jean Abou Samra
> 
>