Re: [boost] [git] Mercurial?

Subject: Re: [boost] [git] Mercurial?
From: Bjørn Roald (bjorn_at_[hidden])
Date: 2012-03-23 03:37:16

On 03/23/2012 12:51 AM, Joel de Guzman wrote:
> Have any of you guys successfully used git-svn and/or hgsubversion
> with the Boost repo? Could you try and give me some hints on how
> to go about it? I'm not an expert on either Git or Hg and if a
> mistake/error will cost many hours of waiting, with indeterminate
> hit-or-miss results, then it's simply not worth trying.

There have been several posts on this list of people setting up public 
git repositories synchronized with git-svn for testing.  Status of those 
are not known to me, but I remember trying to clone from one or two of 
them which worked fine.  So I assume they succeeded in using git-svn.

I have for my own boost repository used git-svn with success against 
official boost svn.  It is slow, but has worked fine for me from a 
kubuntu box.  It is slow with anything involving use of SVN, especially 
the clone as it is actually fetching all boost history (90000 + 
commits), but it works.  I have really only used it to track trunk, and 
I have never tried to push as I have no boost commit access.  So as far 
as a two-way system I really have no idea how well it works except for 
what bold statements you can find on the net.

I have other tracked remote branches in my repo as well.  But I see I 
see now that I have not fetched data into remote/release branch since 
2010.  That is probably just becouse I have only fetched trunk, nothing 
wrong with the tool.  I find tracking multiple branches with git-svn to 
be somewhat broken, at least with regard to follow merging from trunk to 
release in boost.  I have not looked into why that is so.  It may be 
that I am missing something, but trunk fit my needs so I left it with that.

All in all I do not feel like recommending an official git or mercurial 
gateway to boost svn.  It feels wrong for many reasons.  For personal or 
team work it may work OK.  However the main reason is simply that I see 
no reason why the official boost repository or repositories should not 
be a git repository made public by the release team.  That will just 
work so much better.  I am sure Mercurial would work fine as well, but I 
have little experience with it so I am more reluctant to say.

-- 
Bjørn