[gst-devel] GStreamer switching to git

[Ole André Vadla Ravnås]

Hi Felipe!

> On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 1:49 AM, Ole André Vadla Ravnås
> <oleavr at gmail.com> wrote:
...
>> 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]

Last time I checked it requires you to run the supplied terminal with
the self-contained environment. Sort of like a UNIX system in a
nutshell (shell scripts depend on coreutils and other things). This is
obviously not very Windows-friendly, and raises the bar for newcomers
even higher than it already is.

>> 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.

This sounds like a tool problem. Maybe if we moved to SVN it would
implicitly fix this? At least this is seamless when using bazaar, and
if it isn't already with git it should be fixed there IMO.

> 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.

There's one in development, currently at pre-alpha and not yet usable.
Once it's been fully implemented and mature I would be more than happy
with a switch, as that would make git's UI a first-class
Windows-citizen. (Personally I've got nothing against git, it just
isn't ready for Windows yet.)

Cheers,
Ole André