[bt-devel] Misgivings about git (and Gitorious)

[Martin Gruner]

Hi Raoul,

> For instance, if I want to join a team, I need to somehow contact one of the 
> team's administrators, and ask them to add me. In Launchpad, I can simply 
> click on a link that says, "join this team". Perhaps it's just a setting, but 
> it would really lower the barrier to other developers joining our team.
>   
I think this is not really needed, because anyone can create a fork on
Gitorious, work in that, and send merge requests. I believe that whoever
wants to be part of the core team would be posting on bt-devel before
that point.
> Another thing I found was that Gitorious does not seem to have any 
> documentation. I was wanting to find out how the merge request system works, 
> but I couldn't find anything apart from a blog post announcing it's arrival, 
> and a few blog posts complaining about it's limited capabilities (though, to 
> be honest, I think Launchpad has those same limitations).
>   
That is indeed not good. Let's hope that they will bring on
documentation in future.
> So far I've found git to be overly complicated for doing simple tasks, and 
> inflexible to allowing me to use my normal workflow.
>
> For instance, to simply develop in another branch, I have to do the following:
>
> $ git branch feature1
> $ git checkout feature1
>
> If I then want to use another branch, or master, then I have to check it out 
> before I can use it:
>
> $ git checkout feature2
>
> In bzr, for comparison, I can just branch it, and then use it. If I want to 
> use another branch, no commands are necessary, I just do my development.
>
> $ bzr branch trunk feature1
>   
I'm sorry that the Git workflow does not fit your needs. Are you not
able to use bzr-git and work in your familiar environment?
> In addition to this seemingly long-winded way of doing things, git doesn't 
> have the concept of "each directory in it's own branch", which messes with my 
> way of developing. I typically like to have multiple branches checked out at 
> the same time, and work on a little here and a little there at the same time.
>
> In bzr, I can simply open my IDE, reopen my project, and I'm good to go. In 
> git, I have to first checkout the branch I want to work on, open my IDE, 
> recreate a project (because projects are not stored in version control), and 
> then I can start working on it.
>   
Well, in eclipse (EGit) you don't have that problem, and there may be
other IDEs as well. I wouldn't blame Git for that.
> I'm afraid I can't say I am very happy with git, it seems to make simple tasks 
> complicated, and is not nearly as flexible as everyone says it is. Gitorious 
> seems to be a good system, but lacks a few features I would expect of a system 
> of it's calibre.
>   
Thanks for giving us your opinion! If it really is the case that after a
testing period several people say that they cannot work with Git, then
we will definitely reconsider it.

mg