Re: [SVN-MIGRATION] Github

Travis Swicegood wrote:
> Watch out! Linus is gonna get ya: http://www.linux-mips.org/wiki/Git :-)
>

Hey, like I said, I like GIT in fact I really love it.  I'm just not sure it fits in with what *all* the contributors of PHP need.  I could be wrong and if that's the case then all the better for me ;-)

>  From my personal experience, the only thing that has historically made
> Git harder to use is its lack of GUI tools. I imagine if we took a poll
> of contributors on internals@ very few (if any) use a GUI tool (outside
> of possibly an IDE) to commit to PHP. You are correct that Git exposes a
> lot of advanced functionality that can really bite you if you're not
> careful/don't know what you're doing. That said, you have to be
> determined to mess up more than your own repository.
>

You're probably correct about the lack of GUI use (and tools), however I think the concern I'd raise is just around the additional complication with git in general.  The fact that you have local and remote changes, pushing, pulling, merging, rebasing, fetching, cloning I think might add some more learning for those who just want to do "checkout, edit, checkin" type changes. (given of course we can simplify this some for that use case but the complexity still lurks).  That being said, for those of us wanting/needing to maintain and work on patches over the course of weeks or months makes GIT indispendible once you've learned to use it.

One complaint I have about GIT is that creating branches and making them public in the central repository can create a lot of clutter/noise as there's little to no organizational structures for hiding temporary branches that you still want to be public etc.  Whereas svn you can create a branch and toss it in some user specific path like "shires_crap_bracnhes" etc.  I think this is where something like GitHub is really useful, as I can go create a new git repo of PHP and toss it on GitHub and it'll be public for other people to make patches against without cluttering up the main PHP repository regardless of where it lives or even if it's in SVN or GIT.

-shire