[poppler] Switching source control tools.

[Krzysztof Kowalczyk]

On 4/26/07, Jeff Muizelaar <jeff at infidigm.net> wrote:
> So what do people, especially Albert, think? Now that 302 is merged
> (thanks Albert) we have time to do less constructive things like argue
> about which SCM to use :)

I understand that as a non-contributor my opinion doesn't count as much but...

As someone who uses Windows as a main devel OS, I think you're
underplaying the barrier to entry that git adds for windows developers
(on top of existing barriers to entry).

Yes, there are work-arounds (install cygwin or even use VMWare and
share directories between host windows and guest vmware'd linux) and I
did those. There are (significant in my opinion problems with that).
It's significantly more time consuming that downloading and installing
native Subversion client. It doesn't integrate well with native tools
(e.g. if I code in Visual Studio, with SVN I could do all svn
interaction without leaving IDE, with git I would have to switch to
cygwin shell - not a big problem but very annoying). And finally, I
put myself in the "experienced Unix user" category but I don't believe
that's the case with most Windows developers so don't really expect
that most people will be thrilled by the prospect of learning Unix
just so that they can get by in cygwin well enough to use git.

So on the source control front, I don't see a compelling reason for
switching from cvs but if the switch happens, I would much prefer svn
over git.

In general, I think that open-source projects that want their code to
be well supported on Windows should ask "how can we make it easy for
windows developers to contribute" as opposed to "if we do this, will
it be bad enough for them to not contribute".

Using windows-friendly scm is one thing. Providing native build
environment (i.e. Visual Studio project files) would be another. In my
experience a majority of unix-originated project don't put any effort
(or even actively work against) attracting Windows developers and
that, in my opinion, is the reason why they don't get any patches from
them.

Cairo isn't a good example either. It's a very active project but it
actually is often broken on windows and, relatively to overall
activity, gets very little contributions from windows crows (I believe
most of developement was done by Mozilla folks, that don't have a
choice but to make it work on windows well enough for mozilla).

-- kjk | http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf