Re: [Boost-users] What's happened to Ryppl?

Subject: Re: [Boost-users] What's happened to Ryppl?
From: Dean Michael Berris (mikhailberis_at_[hidden])
Date: 2011-01-28 04:06:04

On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 4:24 PM, Anthony Williams <anthony.ajw_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> Edward Diener <eldiener_at_[hidden]> writes:
>
>> On 1/27/2011 12:52 PM, Beman Dawes wrote:
>>> Independent of modularization, ryppl, or anything else, is it time to
>>> start a discussion on the main list about moving to Git?
>>
>> I hope such a discussion entails a very strong justification of why
>> Git is better than Subversion. I still do not buy it, and only find
>> Git more complicated and harder to use than Subversion with little
>> advantage. I fear very much an "emperor's new clothes" situation where
>> everyone is jumping on a bandwagon, because it is the latest thing to
>> do, but no one is bothering to explain why this latest thing has any
>> value to Boost.
>
> Indeed. Also, why git rather than another DVCS such as Mercurial or
> bazaar? Personally, I find Mercurial much easier to use than git, and it
> has the same major advantages (which are essentially common to all DVCS
> systems).
>

I have to be honest here and say up front that I have no idea what the
features of mercurial are, so I have some questions with it in
particular:

1. Does it allow for integrating GnuPG signatures in the commit
messages/history? The popular way for certifying that something is
"official" or "is signed off on by <insert maintainer here>" is
through GnuPG PKI. This is what makes the Linux kernel dev
organization more like a self-organizing matter.

2. Does it allow for compacting and local compression of assets? Git
has a rich set of tools for compressing and dealing with local
repositories. It also has a very efficient way of preserving objects
across branches and what not.

3. Does mercurial work in "email" mode? Git has a way of submitting
patches via email -- and have the same email read-in by git and parsed
as an actual "merge". This is convenient for discussing patches in the
mailing list and preserving the original message/discussion. This
gives people a chance to publicly review the changes and import the
same changeset from the same email message.

4. How does mercurial deal with forks? In Git a repository is
automatically a fork of the source repository. I don't know whether
every mercurial repo is the same as a Git repo though -- meaning
whether the same repository can be exposed to a number of protocols
and dealt with like any other Git repo (push/pull/merge/compact, etc.)

> Also, Mercurial works better on Windows than git does in my experience
> --- the git port for Windows is relatively recent, whereas Mercurial has
> supported Windows for a while. Since many of the boost developers use
> Windows I would have thought this was an important consideration. I
> haven't any personal experience of bazaar, so don't know how it fares in
> this regard.
>

I've used Msysgit for the most part, and it works very well --
actually, works the same in Linux as it does in Windows. Are we
talking about the same Windows port of Git?

> The chief advantage of a DVCS over subversion is that you can do local
> development with full version control (including history) whilst
> offline, and then push/pull when online. Also, you can do incremental
> local commits, so you have the advantage of VC, without pushing
> unfinished changes to the main repository. Branching and merging tends
> to be easier too.
>

+1

-- 
Dean Michael Berris
about.me/deanberris