[poppler] Switching source control tools.

[Kristian Høgsberg]

On 4/26/07, Jeff Muizelaar <jeff at infidigm.net> wrote:
> I sort of hate to bring the issue up because it tends to be contentious.
> However, I think we can all agree that there is very little reason to
> continue using CVS.

Thanks for bringing it up anyway, Jeff.  I've wanted to switch poppler
to git for a while, but since I contribute very little these days, I
didn't want to push the issue.

> The way I see it, we basically have two options: svn and git.
> Personally, I'd prefer git and I'm going to assume Kristian does as
> well.

Yup, I'm on the git team :)  It's the best new tool I've learned in
the past few years, and I'll whole-heartedly recommend it to anybody.
It allows me to branch and merge in ways I would never have dared to
just read the man-page for for CVS.

> However, the most frequent committer is Albert and I'd say there
> is no point thinking about git unless he can be convinced.

Definitely.

> The big disadvantages to git are probably it's ease of use and windows
> portability. Personally, I never really understood CVS and find git much
> more logical. I also don't think the windows issue is that big a deal.
> Git is completely usable in cygwin and there is also work on a mingw
> port. Also, Cairo uses git and it certainly has more active win32
> developers and users than poppler does.

I don't even think the usability issue is much of a problem anymore.
With the 1.5 release of git it's pretty intuitive.  WIth CVS I had to
hit the man pages whenever I had to browse history or create a branch
or a tag.  I never do that with git, and yet I do a lot more advanced
stuff with git than I ever did with CVS.

And another point about git is that it's a lot more forgiving when you
start to learn it, since all your changes stays locally untill you
push them.  So if something goes wrong, you can just delete your local
repository a clone a new one and try again.  And in the end there's
always #poppler, both Jeff and I have significant git experience and
can probably help if somebody gets stuck.

The windows situation is not ideal, but it's not unacceptable.  Plus,
it's getting better with every release.  More and more of the shell
scripts get rewritten in C.

> 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 :)

Hehe.  So far the discussion is going pretty well.  Let's see where we
are in a couple of days.  You can never reach complete consensus on
these issues, but if the core contributors agree, I'll do the
conversion.

thanks,
Kristian