Re: Plans for git

On 2020-09-19, Zaphod Beeblebrox <zbeeble_at_gmail.com> wrote:

> Hrm.  Maybe what I hear others saying, tho, and not entirely being replied
> to is just a nice concise document of the why.  What I hear you saying is
> that GIT has momentum and that it's popular... (and I accept that --- it is
> evidently true), but then I hear handwaving about features, but no list of
> features that are a clear win/loose.

How about the very basics (that Warner appears to have lost sight
of)?

Git is a distributed version control system.  You clone a repository
and apart from pulling and pushing changes to another repository,
all your work happens with the local repository.  Subversion has a
central repository and needs to talk to the server all the time.
Laptop on a plane?  No change of workflow with Git.

And since it's your repository, you can cheaply create your own
branches, where you can commit your work and have a versioned history
of it instead of just a flat diff.  I can't overstate the value of
that.  Whether you work on something that will be pushed back
upstream or just your private changes, it has a full commit history.
You can easily revert commits, you can upstream it one by one, you
can upstream it with history.

When FreeBSD switched from CVS to SVN, there was hope or promise
of lightweight branches, but that never materialized.  Developers
still can't have private branches in the FreeBSD repository.  For
a while, a lot of development happened in a Perforce repository--a
commerical version control system, whose company had donated a
license--which offered this feature.  Nowadays, everybody who does
any but the most trivial development does so in a private Git
repository anyway.  It only makes sense to interface this directly
with the FreeBSD repository instead of going through a SVN<>Git
media break.

> Certainly the only clear things a quick search turns up that seem relevant
> is that GIT is GPL2.0 and SVN is Apache2.0.  This was enough for LLVM vs
> GCC and the repository is a core function, but I suppose not a necessary
> function for forked projects that can't abide, so...

There is a bit of historical precedent: The original BSD work at
Berkeley was kept in a SCCS repository, a proprietary version control
system at the time.

And of course the fact that significant FreeBSD development has
effectively happened in Perforce, then in Git for a long time and
is just merged back into the Subversion repository.  To put it
bluntly, the people doing the work have voted with their feet years
ago.

-- 
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          naddy_at_mips.inka.de