[poppler] Switching source control tools.

[Albert Astals Cid]

A Dijous 26 Abril 2007, Jeff Muizelaar va escriure:
> On Thu, Apr 26, 2007 at 12:58:41PM -0700, Krzysztof Kowalczyk wrote:
> > 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).
>
> Maybe. I'm probably not the best example, but I've used both cvs
> (Tortoise and Cygwin) and git on windows and I much prefer git.
>
> > 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).
>
> I'm curious what the problem were with using cygwin. I can't say I've
> had any signficant problems using cygwin.
>
> > 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).
>
> I could list annoyances with using SVN or CVS vs. git too:
> - performance (this one is huge)
> - lack of something like StGit
> - lack of something like 'git log [directory]'
> - lack of a decent web interface on freedesktop
>
> > 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.
>
> Wouldn't they have to learn Unix well enough to build Poppler as
> well? Once they've gotten that far, using git isn't much harder.
>
> > 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.
>
> Just the concept of having atomic changes to the source tree is as
> compelling reason as I think we need. Personally, I don't see a
> compelling reason to keep using cvs.
>
> > 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".
>
> This of course needs to be weighed against the cost that this has on
> unix developers.
>
> > 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.
>
> CVS wasn't a very windows-friendly scm when it was 2 years old either.
> It only became friendly because enough windows users needed to use CVS.
> Plus, there is work being done to make git easier to use on windows like
> the eclipse plugin and the SoC mono port.
>
> > 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).
>
> But I don't think that the lack of contributions from windows people is
> because cairo uses git. I could be wrong, but I don't think the number
> of windows contributions has gone down significantly from when cairo
> used CVS. My point here was just that the cairo people do actually care
> about the windows folk. Whereas, afaik, Poppler doesn't even try to be
> buildable on windows.

Well, in my opinion me we are not against poppler on windows, just that noone 
is working on it :-D

P.S: As a sidenode, since August last year, my blog received from google

127 people searching for "poppler windows"
  8 people searching for "poppler for windows"
  8 people searching for "windows poppler"
  5 people searching for "poppler on windows"
  3 people searching for "poppler+windows"
  3 people searching for "pdf poppler windows"
  3 people searching for "Poppler windows"
  3 people searching for "poppler mingw"
  3 people searching for "poppler pdf windows"
  3 people searching for "+poppler +windows"
  2 people searching for "poppler pdf viewer windows"
  2 people searching for "poppler pdf windows"
  2 people searching for "compile windows poppler qt4"
  1 person searching for "window pdf reader poppler"

and to compare only 

  6 people searching for "poppler"
  6 people searching for "poppler-qt4 download"
  6 people searching for "poppler qt4"
  3 people searching for "poppler vs xpdf"
  3 people searching for "poppler-qt4"
  2 people searching for "kpdf poppler"
  2 people searching for "poppler-0.4.3"
  2 people searching for "kpdf poppler patch"
  1 person searching for "poppler opengl" <---- WTF?

So it seems THERE is a "market" for poppler on windows, we just need someone 
working on it :D


Albert

>
> -Jeff
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