[sword-devel] Using Git for Sword development?

[Greg Hellings]

On Sat, Feb 8, 2020 at 1:49 PM Tobias Klein <contact at tklein.info> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Have you guys been thinking about migrating the Sword sources to Git?
>

We have this discussion every year.

I think this would be an enabler for better collaboration, considering
> the merge capabilities of Git and for example the nice merge/pull
> request based review functionalities in GitLab (or GitHub).
>

Every time, this gets lots of people voting "yes"!

Every time the short answer is the same:
Troy doesn't want it moved. So it is not going to get moved.

The longer answer also remains the same:
Git has no simple method, in a similar vein to SVN, to allow Troy to easily
manage commit rights to particular portions of the repository. He wants to
keep tight control over who can commit where (e.g. I can commit anywhere
under the "bindings" or "cmake" directories or to any file named
"CMakeLists.txt", but nowhere else in the repo) and does not believe the
code review process in git front-ends is sufficient for this. Writing a git
hook to ensure this is not difficult, but also not completely trivial. In
SVN it's a very simple matter. It's not a lack of familiarity with git
(Troy develops Bishop within a git repository and seems a relatively
intelligent software developer overall). It's literally this one missing
feature, at least that's the one impediment he's spoken about in the past.

So:
* Would git greatly increase the ability of people to contribute to Sword?
Yes
* Would Troy host Sword's canonical repository somewhere like Github?
Probably not
* Is Sword going to move to git without, at the very least, a solution to
this directory write problem? Nope
* Is that problem surmountable? Yes, but no one has stepped up and
implemented it in a githook, and SVN is working fine in Troy's view to not
encourage him to write it himself.

--Greg


> Best regards,
> Tobias
>
>
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