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Just a few more comments related to the possible switch. First, just an observation - the people who said they don't mind are those who have write access to SVN.
Thats a fair comment, probably because they are the ones who will be most affected by the change, who will use it the most, and will have to change their workflow the most. Humans don't like change, even (or especially) programmers who are exposed to lots of it.
I agree that for them the switch is much
less important - they can create their branches to develop and back up the work in progress and for their own development the current workflow is OK. The current situation is worse for external contributors who don't submit their patches so often to have SVN access. They either don't have their work backed up, or they have to create their own repository e.g. at gitorious as I did. When they finish their work, they can't just tell "please pull from here" but have to submit their patches by email. This is harder for the maintainers too - they have to manually apply the patches from the email instead of just "git pull".
This workflow is only likely when changes are submitted by well known and experienced submitters. Otherwise it will be import to local clone, check and edit it some, then commit and push upstream, so the problems you describe below will still exist AFAICT. Many patches get the response, "committed but I changed xxx". Also you don't want to pull every daily backup commit from the user into the main repository.
Finally, it will be the maintainer
who makes the commit and the information about the original committer is lost with SVN - with git you see every single commit author (this means you have to add some "thanks to" to the commit message for SVN - this work would be eliminated with git). Finally, you can forget about updating ChangeLog - this can be generated automatically by git (GNOME libraries usually have one pre-git ChangeLog and then a changelog automatically generated from the git history during "make distcheck"). So what I want to say here is that while the core developer's development work won't be affected by the switch much, the collaboration with external developers will improve considerably.
On the other hand you are right - git is a bit harder to use and there will be many "doh" moments. The learning curve is steeper that with SVN but when you learn it (I really don't want to make an impression I'm an expert here - git still surprises me sometimes),
Now thats the last thing you want from a VCS, surprise, what you want is stability, ease of use and simplicity, power and speed are nice to haves only if the preceding are there.
I understand from reading the Advanced Git book that it is reasonably hard to actually lose data, but it also looks rather hard to recover from a mistake by an inexperienced user.
you'll realize
git is a very powerful and helpful tool.
There has been some discussion about changing the bug tracker at the same time - I would make it an independent issue. My personal opinion is that you should just stay with sourceforge - moving the whole bug tracker somewhere else is too much manual work rewarded by too little gain.
Good point.
Cheers Lex
Cheers,
Jiri _______________________________________________ Geany-devel mailing list Geany-devel@uvena.de http://lists.uvena.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geany-devel