[PLUG-Devel] Rah, rah git! [Was: OT: sourceforge or codeplex or googlecode for OSS hosting]

[voltagespike+plugdevel at fastmail.fm]

On Sep 19, 2008, at 10:40 AM, Ted Gould wrote:

> I've also seen one blogger encouraging rebase to make you look like  
> a better programmer
> that didn't need all those intermediate commits :)

There's nothing wrong with making yourself look smarter. I,  
personally, prefer the clean history, and it isn't unusual to see a  
few check-ins for a feature (refactor code in preparation, add new  
functionality, enable new functionality and add configuration  
options). Without refactor, these three tasks would end up very  
interleaved. Of course, the same could be accomplished through the use  
of patch stacks (presumably loom would work).

> Ah, so it's similar.  You just don't have things like shared data in  
> the
> same process like you would with a plugin.  Git has Web 1.0 Plugins ;)

Ouch, that's just mean. :-P

> Meld does lines, but then also changes the saturations for the words  
> in
> the lines that are changed.

That is how a lot of tools work. It's usually okay for code, but  
horrendous for reflowed text. If I add/modify a sentence into the  
middle of a paragraph, it's close to impossible to find out after the  
fact what actually changed.

>> Not for the past 9 months or so. Most of the limitations of the FAT
>> filesystem (case insensitivity, limited charset, symbolic links,  
>> etc.)
>> have workarounds that are nicer than I would have expected. What git
>> lacks is a "compatibility" mode for Linux users interacting with
>> Windows users. I'm not sure how well Bazaar handles this.
>
> Bazaar uses the same repository format on Windows, Linux, etc.  I  
> didn't
> realize that was fixed in Git,

Git uses the same repostiory format on all platforms, as well, and I  
don't believe there is a filesystem that won't store the repository.  
(As an aside, they modified temporary file creation a few months back  
so that the length of the temporary file matched the length of the  
final file because it allowed the faster in-place renaming on some  
file systems ... including, I believe, FAT.)

No, what I was referring to was the contents of the repository. There  
is no way to say "this project shouldn't use symbolic links, certain  
character sets, or mixed-case filenames". When the target platform  
doesn't support those features, git handles it in the best possible  
way (e.g., don't change the file type if it was originally a symbolic  
link and the contents are unchanged, or ignore case changes when the  
file written and the file read are technically different). S

I don't have enough experience with bzr and such platforms to know how  
it behaves.

> I guess that's not a huge deal though, just can't share on something  
> like a USB key.

I actually use a USB for one of my backups. It's kinda' nice that new  
data simply requires the addition of a new delta packfile (minimize I/ 
O and flash wear), but I have to imagine bzr does something similar.

>> Well, there is github and Codebase but I couldn't even begin to
>> compare the commercial offerings.
>
> Hmm, neither of those seem to provide commercial support and training.
> Perhaps I got the links wrong?

Support, yes. Training, no. There is at least one company offering  
commercial training services, but I can't recall the name.

> I was thinking "Project Hosting" not "Branch Hosting."  All of those
> provide a place to put your branches, but not a bug tracker that'll
> respond to your commits.  Things like mailing lists and file
> distribution too.

At least Codebase and Unfuddle offer integrated bug tracking/ticket  
systems. I'm not sure about mailing lists.

> Heh, well yes, that too.  But I was trying to say as long as they're
> going open source I'm happy ;)

Open source is great, but it's also great that the best distributed  
SCM tools all happen to be open source (well, I hear AccuRev is  
fantastic and allows the same development model, but it's not truly  
distributed).

Thanks for the interesting discussion. I'll give the newest Bazaar a  
spin later and see if my opinions have changed.

Cheers.

-- 
                                                         Voltage Spike
       ,,,
      (. .)
--ooO-(_)-Ooo--