Re: Moving to git?

On 19.06.2008, at 15:58, Guillaume Cottenceau wrote:

> Stipe Tolj <st 'at' tolj.org> writes:
>
>> My major concern is the user side. I know that git is used for
>> the kernel and kernel-close projects. But these are all C hard
>> coders, they "know what they do" (now, I guess we hope so :p),
>> but Kannel users are more the application users.
>
> I don't really see the difference you're trying to push here. If
> that's a programming language problem or a "non kernel" thing
> issue, then ruby on rails is using git, fedora's installation
> program (in python) is using git, multiple GNU tools such as
> autoconf, automake or coreutils are using git, etc. And many
> Debian projects:
>
> http://git.debian.org/


Debian is just a "small" world. there's many other linuxe's out there  
and many many other unixes and non unixes.
And I wouldn't care less on what ruby on rails is using. Thats by far  
not any reference to what we do with Kannel. Python or Perl also have  
their own way of checking out repositories so we could come up as well  
with a KannelVS or the like if we want to go that way (which we don't  
want to of course).

 From a developer view I would say, if you use cvs, svn or git comes  
to the same. You check out from a repository and you commit to it.  
That's the day to day work. If you do it from the command line it  
doesn't matter that much if you type "cvs commit" or "svn commit" or  
"git commit". And so far there are not a lot of branches in the  
current cvs of kannel. There's basically a single repository for  
development and a branch for stable releases. Those things are  
maintained by hand I guess  as its pretty rare.

Because of this, many repositories for C project still use cvs. iIs  
available for all unixes out there and for non unixes mostly too. Its  
old but it does what it's supposed to do. So its the lowest common  
denominator. It has a few issues in my eyes. One of them is version  
number on individual files instead of the whole project and the non  
removable directories. Going back to a specific version means finding  
out in time when this could have been. Subversion (svn) has overcome  
those issues and is widely used so far. Git is even newer and used on  
less projects. I have checked out many open source repositories in the  
past and so far I have not come across git yet.

I've checked through some popular open source projects which are not  
Linux only.

php uses CVS.
mysql used cvs and now svn
Apache uses svn
Asterisk uses svn
Wireshark uses svn

So who uses git ?


If you would ask me to switch from cvs to svn, I would not see a  
problem. git however is not integrated in my main platforms. I figured  
out that its pretty easy to install from source on my MacOS X machine  
but I have not tried solaris 8 yet which probably is more of an issue.  
What however does not work is the GUI tools I use on a daily basis.  
Which means I can not use any gui to see diff's of a specific revision  
etc. I would have to do it on the command line so git would be a step  
back for me.

And frankly I don't see the real day to day benefits of git over svn.  
Svn is wide spread, comes with my preferred operating system already  
built in.
That's not true for Debian Net install for example (even though its  
only one command away....).


> And any people can view the git repo as a CVS repo with
> git-cvsserver, if you want to be nice to some users

You want to be nice to the core developers and main commiters of  
Kannel. Those who work on it. For checkout of anonymous folks, you can  
put up a tar.gz file or binary on to the website.


> (but again,
> as my simple example showed in last mail, a simple 3-steps
> documentation will show a git newbie how to get the repo and
> submit a patch).

what's wrong with

cvs diff -u   or   svn diff   ?

Thats just one step instead of 3 ;-)


>> Question: Is git POSIX.1 compliant? In terms of platform abstraction?
>
> According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(software) it's
> POSIX. Quoting the page:
>
>  Git is targeted to run on Linux, but can be used on other
>  Unix-like operating systems including BSD, Solaris and Darwin.
>  Git is extremely fast on POSIX-based systems such as Linux. Git
>  also runs on Windows.
>
> And don't forget that by using git-cvsserver one can access a git
> repo with cvs.

I followed
	http://dysinger.net/2007/12/30/installing-git-on-mac-os-x-105-leopard/
to get it installed. It has already 2 dependencies I don't like.
	gettext    doesnt come with my system. Its installable but it takes  
an awful lot of time to get it compiled.
	gcrypt	gnu crypto stuff often is not very portable outside linux. I  
had some bad experiences with gnuTLS (still doesnt work for me). This  
one however seemed to work.


>> There is no Linux specific requirements I guess? What is the
>> underlying repo storage type? Berkeley DB?
>
> It's an (extremely efficient) internal data storage format, seen
> as local files on the filesystem.
>
> As a last comment on the storage type, here's a quote from some
> git documentation:
>
>  The Mozilla repository is reported to be almost 12 GiB when
>  stored in SVN using the fsfs backend. The fsfs backend also
>  requires over 240,000 files in one directory to record all
>  240,000 commits made over the 10 year project history. The
>  exact same history is stored in Git by only two files totaling
>  just over 420 MiB. SVN requires 30x the disk space to store the
>  same history.

I would not say diskspace is an issue for the kannel project  We don't  
have THAT many source files or commits compared to Mozilla.

One thing: how do you backup a git repository? As SVN has lots of  
files, you can do incremental backups. Is that the case with git or  
would it simply have two big monster files you have to do a full  
backup of on a daily basis?

Stipe: how big is our current repository?




Andreas Fink

Fink Consulting GmbH
Global Networks Schweiz AG
BebbiCell AG
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