[Geany-devel] Git switch

[Lex Trotman]

<snip>

> 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
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