[bt-devel] Using git

[Greg Hellings]

Eeli,

On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 4:05 PM, Eeli Kaikkonen
<eekaikko at mail.student.oulu.fi> wrote:
> I have played with git version control system. I have done it privately,
> using git-svn between my own git repo and sourceforge svn repo. I have
> to say I now believe all the hype around distributed version systems.
> Svn is good enough for some of our purposes, but it's quite rigid. I
> have thought about possibility of having a public git repository for
> BibleTime code. Svn could (and should) be used in the future, but more
> informal git repository could be nice for experimenting, branching,
> merging and sharing ideas.
>
> I have several branches here which I use for different things. If you
> want to play with some small idea you can just create a branch, change
> the code and then either delete the branch or merge the code to another
> branch (or "HEAD").
>
> I also have a problem with two places where I spend time/do coding. It
> would be good to have an internet repository where I could store my work
> instead of copying files or diffs to memstick.
>
> Distributed vcs is great for sharing changes. We could share even the
> code which is not yet ready. It's not practical with svn. I have not
> really done any merging with svn but they say it's painful. It's one of
> the reasons why for example Linus Torvalds says CVS/SVN is fundamentally
> wrong. I don't have much first-hand experience of this but I still
> agree. Take a patch from Greg for example. He said it's for those who
> want to do something else than some others do. Would it be reasonable to
> put it in the SVN repo, in a branch? Could it be maintained there so
> that when the HEAD is updated the changes  would be merged to the
> branch? With git it should be easy.

That is the purpose of SVN branches versus HEAD.  Likely for my recent
patch, a separate branch to make changes relative to SWORD SVN would
have been made, then merged into HEAD, which is the main development
of BibleTime features.  However, I've never actually performed such an
action, but most of what I hear is that it's tedious, difficult and
time-consuming.

I have two friends who use git and claim they'll never voluntarily go
back to SVN.  I'd be willing to give it a go.  As far as I understand
you just toss your git into a web server and I would point my git at
yours.  Then I could play around all day and make changes in mine,
while having it accessible from Apache, and you could then tell your
git to pull mine if you like where mine is going, and merge them
together directly.

It might not be a bad idea - again all of the above is hearsay and I
haven't tried git at all.  But it would sure make passing patches back
and forth easier.  And, if one of you gentlemen who are in charge of
the SVN anyway still keep the SVN up-to-date, then the rest of us
passing git around shouldn't be a problem at all, so long as you guys
know how to sync changes made back to Subversion on SourceForge.

--Greg