[gst-devel] GStreamer switching to git

[Ole André Vadla Ravnås]

On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 2:14 AM, Sean Estabrooks <seanlkml at sympatico.ca> wrote:
> On Thu, 10 Jul 2008 01:49:18 +0300
> "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.
>
> This isn't really true.  There are multiple projects which already make Git
> use on MSWin acceptable.  You don't need to install Cygwin, Git installs
> just like any other application and runs just fine:
>
>    http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/
>
> There are some GUI tools being developed and there is a almost-full version
> of Git now developed in Java which can be incorporated into the Eclipse IDE
> etc.  On top of which, Git isn't just a collection of shell scripts any longer, they're
> being converted over to C one by one.

I'm aware that things are in heavy development, and that's really
promising. However, for those of us stuck doing GStreamer development
on this broken platform it's less of an option to put our current
efforts on hold, or reduce our productivity by having to fix bugs in
tools that aren't quite there yet. There's certainly enough
interesting problems to solve with the code itself on this platform,
and personally I'm already bogged down with maintenance of another
build system (because autotools isn't usable for day-to-day
development on Windows), and introducing even more tools that aren't
there yet on the portability-side will just make things even less
productive.

I think git has a lot of potential, but I don't think that /now/ is
the right time to switch. I'd say give it a few months and then
re-evaluate.

Cheers,
Ole André