[ruby-core:21193] Re: Happy new year and... moving Ruby development to Git?

On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 3:04 PM, Michael Klishin
<[e-mail]> wrote:
>
> On 07.01.2009, at 16:14, Giuseppe Bilotta wrote:
>
>> I'm not Matz, but I would say that an official git mirror of the svn
>> repository is a necessary first step to begin a possible transition to
>> the new vcs
>
>
> There are already read-only mirrors. They make little sense: the reason to
> switch is that with git and github even complex flow of patches simpler to
> handle that simple cases like Brett's patches with SVN/diff/patch.
>
> diff/patch do not have history of changes, so a person who does the merge
> must take care and keep that history in one's head. It stops a lot of people
> from even trying to contribute, since they unconsciously feel how fun it's
> gonna be for others to manage a couple of giant patches (remember, you have
> no local commits).
>
> This happens unconsciously. With Git, you just fork Ruby on GitHub, do the
> work incrementally and send a link to your branch to ruby-core, and people
> have all the history provided by the tool, and don't have to keep patches
> order and who sent them in their heads.
>
> This is my personal perspective of the way things are. I may be totally
> wrong. But I still think that keeping main repository in Subversion and
> providing "official git mirror" makes no sense at all, since it won't really
> change the way contributions are made.

Sorry, I don't agree. Having one single official mirror of the ruby
repository, instead of a number of unofficial, community-provided
repository means that you can in fact start working on your own github
forks: even though obviously the full power of the git and github
tools cannot be exploited for the patch workflow, it would still be
possible for e.g. Brent to keep his MBARI patchset in a branch of his
fork of the official git mirror, easying access to the rest of the
community.

Of course it wouldn't be the perfect solution until the full
transition to git is done, but, as I said, it's a necessary first
step. Moreover, as the git mirror would probably get a LARGE user base
to switch, it's likely to be a big point in favour of the switch.


-- 
Giuseppe "Oblomov" Bilotta