Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Jeremy Kolb <jkolb AT brandeis.edu>]

David Brown wrote:
> Since I've had several questions about using git scm (the scm that the
> linux kernel uses) for the grimoires heres the way I could see us
> using it and how things would change from the current system. Most of
> the steps I deal with are using pure git if you use cogito some steps
> may be simplified or removed.
> 
> Use Case Changes:
> 
> 1) guru update and submit
> currently the guru submitting code to the repository is very
> centralized and requires constant access to the net when editing code.
> 
> the change would be that there wouldn't need to be any access to the
> net because the guru would have an exact copy of the repository off
> the server that everyone uses. However to get code to the public
> grimoire for everyone to use there'd be one more level of indirection.
> 
> the current steps to commit changes to the public grimoire are:
> 1) open files for edit
> 2) hack hack hack
> 3) commit open files (or some subset)
> 4) repeat 3 until happy
> 
> the reason for 4 being there is that most of the TL's have told me
> (and through experience) splitting up commits to encompass one change
> (instead of one spell update in the test grimoire and one in the games
> grimoire) is a good thing and good development practice.
> 
> the new steps to commit using a git repo would be the following:
> 1) hack hack hack
> 2) update index to encaplulate the commit
> 3) commit the files
> 4) repeat 1-3 until happy
> 5) pull the changes from your grimoire to the public grimoire.
> 
> step 5 could include asking certain TL's to pull the changes to the
> public grimoire or if you have permissions ssh'ing in to the main
> system and then pulling from your grimoire to the public one.
> 
> There would also be an alternative path as well:
> 3) perform a diff on the head
> 4) email the diff
> 
> step 4 would be to someone who has permissions to edit the public
> grimoire or the ml where some one with those permissions would then
> apply the patch.
> 
> ==== Pros of Using git ====
> 1) No internet access needed until you want your changes pulled to the
> public grimoire :DDD
> 2) decentralized repos, since everyone (including users if they use
> git to pull their grimories to use on their system) would have a copy
> of the repository and all it's history, so changing the DNS to point
> to someone else temporarily would be easy and many people could do it.
> 3) making small diffs for general updates of spells would be quicker (I 
> think).
> 4) git-diff is and has always been relative to the root of the
> grimoire no fscking with the -p value on patches using git, it's all
> standardized.
> 
> ==== Cons of Using git ====
> 1) Depending on how permissions for the publicly accessed grimoires
> are handled our TL's could have more work to do.  Either Arwed would
> have to do this solo or he would have to choose people for a 'super
> guru' set that would have permission to pull from other guru's
> grimoires.
> I would advise not giving everyone permissions to the public grimoire
> because I'm not sure if a git pull can manage blowing over several
> files at once... haven't tried it.
> 
> These are just my thoughts on using git let me know what you thing about it.
> There are several frontends for git including a bash frontend called cogito.
> 
> - David Brown
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We use git for xcb (xcb.freedesktop.org) and it works well, dunno about
maintaining repos but for code commit etc it's pretty neat.

Jeremy