[gst-devel] GStreamer switching to git

[Felipe Contreras]

Hi Ole André,

On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 1:49 AM, Ole André Vadla Ravnås
<oleavr at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> As Julien pointed out there was a GStreamer summit at GUADEC on
> Sunday. Sadly for me I wasn't able to attend as I arrived in Istanbul
> one day too late. However, I just read Andy Wingo's blogpost[1] and
> was really surprised to learn about one topic discussed and decided
> upon there. It was decided to switch GStreamer from using CVS to git
> (as soon as some minor migration issues have been resolved).
>
> So then I feel inclined to ask; why was this decision made without any
> technical discussion with all interested parties in the community?
>
> I strongly object to this decision, and for one specific technical
> reason. git does not work acceptably on Windows, and this is caused by
> the basic design of its UI. It's a collection of shell-scripts, and
> thus it relies on MSYS or cygwin. Yes, it "works", but this is like
> telling people that MS Office supports Linux because you can run it
> through WINE.

Is msysgit not good enough? [1]

> Doing GStreamer development on Windows has already got a high
> threshold for newcomers because of things like autotools, so can we
> please avoid switching our RCS to something equally orthogonal to
> Windows?
>
> git is nice just like fork() is also nice when used right, but neither
> are portable and just because they "work" on such platforms doesn't
> mean they're usable for developers stuck there.
>
> I am however not too certain that it'll be possible to agree on one
> DRCS, so maybe it'd be better to just stick with a centralized RCS and
> use mirrored branches like quite a few of you are already doing today?

At first I thought that was a good idea, but now that I understand git
better I see that things are smoother when everything is in git.

In any case there's a bzr plugin that allows you to interact with git,
right? There's no reason to have a central repository in svn, so
people can use git-svn and bzr-svn when we can skip the svn part. I
don't know about hg, but I don't think many people advocate it in
GStreamer.

Best regards.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/

-- 
Felipe Contreras