GStreamer switching to git

[Ole André Vadla Ravnås]

Hi all,

As Julien pointed out there was a GStreamer summit at GUADEC on
Sunday. Sadly for me I wasn't able to attend as I arrived in Istanbul
one day too late. However, I just read Andy Wingo's blogpost[1] and
was really surprised to learn about one topic discussed and decided
upon there. It was decided to switch GStreamer from using CVS to git
(as soon as some minor migration issues have been resolved).

So then I feel inclined to ask; why was this decision made without any
technical discussion with all interested parties in the community?

I strongly object to this decision, and for one specific technical
reason. git does not work acceptably on Windows, and this is caused by
the basic design of its UI. It's a collection of shell-scripts, and
thus it relies on MSYS or cygwin. Yes, it "works", but this is like
telling people that MS Office supports Linux because you can run it
through WINE.

Doing GStreamer development on Windows has already got a high
threshold for newcomers because of things like autotools, so can we
please avoid switching our RCS to something equally orthogonal to
Windows?

git is nice just like fork() is also nice when used right, but neither
are portable and just because they "work" on such platforms doesn't
mean they're usable for developers stuck there.

I am however not too certain that it'll be possible to agree on one
DRCS, so maybe it'd be better to just stick with a centralized RCS and
use mirrored branches like quite a few of you are already doing today?

Cheers,
Ole André

[1] http://wingolog.org/archives/2008/07/09/notes-from-the-bosphorus

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[Felipe Contreras]

Hi Ole André,

On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 1:49 AM, Ole André Vadla Ravnås
<[hidden email]> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> As Julien pointed out there was a GStreamer summit at GUADEC on
> Sunday. Sadly for me I wasn't able to attend as I arrived in Istanbul
> one day too late. However, I just read Andy Wingo's blogpost[1] and
> was really surprised to learn about one topic discussed and decided
> upon there. It was decided to switch GStreamer from using CVS to git
> (as soon as some minor migration issues have been resolved).
>
> So then I feel inclined to ask; why was this decision made without any
> technical discussion with all interested parties in the community?
>
> I strongly object to this decision, and for one specific technical
> reason. git does not work acceptably on Windows, and this is caused by
> the basic design of its UI. It's a collection of shell-scripts, and
> thus it relies on MSYS or cygwin. Yes, it "works", but this is like
> telling people that MS Office supports Linux because you can run it
> through WINE.

Is msysgit not good enough? [1]

> Doing GStreamer development on Windows has already got a high
> threshold for newcomers because of things like autotools, so can we
> please avoid switching our RCS to something equally orthogonal to
> Windows?
>
> git is nice just like fork() is also nice when used right, but neither
> are portable and just because they "work" on such platforms doesn't
> mean they're usable for developers stuck there.
>
> I am however not too certain that it'll be possible to agree on one
> DRCS, so maybe it'd be better to just stick with a centralized RCS and
> use mirrored branches like quite a few of you are already doing today?

At first I thought that was a good idea, but now that I understand git
better I see that things are smoother when everything is in git.

In any case there's a bzr plugin that allows you to interact with git,
right? There's no reason to have a central repository in svn, so
people can use git-svn and bzr-svn when we can skip the svn part. I
don't know about hg, but I don't think many people advocate it in
GStreamer.

Best regards.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/

--
Felipe Contreras
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[Sean Estabrooks]

On Thu, 10 Jul 2008 01:49:18 +0300
"Ole André Vadla Ravnås" <[hidden email]> wrote:

> I strongly object to this decision, and for one specific technical
> reason. git does not work acceptably on Windows, and this is caused by
> the basic design of its UI. It's a collection of shell-scripts, and
> thus it relies on MSYS or cygwin. Yes, it "works", but this is like
> telling people that MS Office supports Linux because you can run it
> through WINE.

This isn't really true.  There are multiple projects which already make Git
use on MSWin acceptable.  You don't need to install Cygwin, Git installs
just like any other application and runs just fine:

    http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/

There are some GUI tools being developed and there is a almost-full version
of Git now developed in Java which can be incorporated into the Eclipse IDE
etc.  On top of which, Git isn't just a collection of shell scripts any longer, they're
being converted over to C one by one.  

So if you're one of the unfortunate souls having to develop on MSWin you
can now use all the powerful features of Git without much fuss ;o)

Cheers.
Sean

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[Forest-39]

Ole Andr? Vadla Ravn?s wrote:
> I strongly object to this decision, and for one specific technical
> reason. git does not work acceptably on Windows, and this is caused by
> the basic design of its UI. It's a collection of shell-scripts, and
> thus it relies on MSYS or cygwin. Yes, it "works", but this is like
> telling people that MS Office supports Linux because you can run it
> through WINE.

I'm merely a lurker on this list, but for the record, Mercurial (hg) works
very well on both unix and windows.  It also has a reputation for being
more intuitive to use than git, and at least as fast, with a similarly
strong underlying design.



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[David Schleef]

On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 01:49:18AM +0300, Ole André Vadla Ravnås wrote:
> So then I feel inclined to ask; why was this decision made without any
> technical discussion with all interested parties in the community?
...


The reasons for choosing a new VCS are not technical.  There are
essentially only minor technical differences between the various
options.  An individual feature may seem very important to you, but
in the grand scheme of things, it probably isn't.  Everything has
its plusses and minuses.

The reasons for choosing a particular VCS are:

 - Do we have hosting available?  Are we (the main group of developers)
   familiar with the admins, know how to find them on IRC, know how to
   get them to do maintence, etc?  Does one of us have admin priviliges?
   Are there regular backups?

 - Is there someone willing to invest the time (say, two weeks) to
   convert the repository, with all its warts, to the new VCS?

 - Is there someone (preferably several people) willing to handhold
   anyone in the IRC channel to start using the new VCS?  Are they
   capable of nicely answering the same stupid questions 10 times
   per day?  Are they able to commit to being around for at least a
   few weeks?  Are they able to spend time researching more difficult
   problems as they arise?

In each of those cases, the overwhelming choice is git.  Freedesktop.org
already uses git for most projects.  Secondly, bilboed has already
done a rough conversion, and knows what else needs to be done.  Thirdly,
there are several (well-known) people who frequent the channel who are
familiar with git, and at least one (myself) that has committed to being
a newbie punching bag.

Now, if someone (or two or three) dependable shows up and offers to do
all of the above for another VCS, I'd be all for it.  bilboed and I have
other projects we could be spending our time on.



dave...


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[Thadeu Lima de Souza Cascardo]

On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 01:49:18AM +0300, Ole André Vadla Ravnås wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I strongly object to this decision, and for one specific technical
> reason. git does not work acceptably on Windows, and this is caused by
> the basic design of its UI. It's a collection of shell-scripts, and
> thus it relies on MSYS or cygwin. Yes, it "works", but this is like
> telling people that MS Office supports Linux because you can run it
> through WINE.
>

I will be another one to say mention another alternative for you:
git-cvsserver. However, given the other choices people had already
given, and that git-cvsserver may be another needed setup and may not
serve the purpose of using git if given write access, I think you should
go with the altenatives for using git in Windows. Or you may change
your platform.  :-)

Cheers,
Thadeu Cascardo.

>
> Cheers,
> Ole André
>
> [1] http://wingolog.org/archives/2008/07/09/notes-from-the-bosphorus

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[Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller]

I think Davids points basically sums up the discussion at the meeting.
The discussion was not 'which is the ultimate VCS system' as such
discussions tend to be completely useless and just means we end up
staying with CVS due to lack of consensus for the forseeable future.

The general agreement was that it was time to move on from CVS. We knew
that there is wide agreement in the community about this. So the
question came down to the kind of things that David listed.

So if anyone wants to see GStreamer switch to something else than git,
that is fine, but you need to start that discussion with two arguments:

a) We (there needs to be more than one person knowing the system) are
willing to spend the time and effort to do the conversion and help
fellow developers with the conversion.
b) This is something that the freedesktop sysadmins are able and willing
to help us support.

So while not everyone who where at the meeting loved git above
everything else, the agreement was that if one wasn't willing or able to
provide the above, one was only providing unconstructive stop energy.

Christian


On Wed, 2008-07-09 at 18:59 -0700, David Schleef wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 01:49:18AM +0300, Ole André Vadla Ravnås wrote:
> > So then I feel inclined to ask; why was this decision made without any
> > technical discussion with all interested parties in the community?
> ...
>
>
> The reasons for choosing a new VCS are not technical.  There are
> essentially only minor technical differences between the various
> options.  An individual feature may seem very important to you, but
> in the grand scheme of things, it probably isn't.  Everything has
> its plusses and minuses.
>
> The reasons for choosing a particular VCS are:
>
>  - Do we have hosting available?  Are we (the main group of developers)
>    familiar with the admins, know how to find them on IRC, know how to
>    get them to do maintence, etc?  Does one of us have admin priviliges?
>    Are there regular backups?
>
>  - Is there someone willing to invest the time (say, two weeks) to
>    convert the repository, with all its warts, to the new VCS?
>
>  - Is there someone (preferably several people) willing to handhold
>    anyone in the IRC channel to start using the new VCS?  Are they
>    capable of nicely answering the same stupid questions 10 times
>    per day?  Are they able to commit to being around for at least a
>    few weeks?  Are they able to spend time researching more difficult
>    problems as they arise?
>
> In each of those cases, the overwhelming choice is git.  Freedesktop.org
> already uses git for most projects.  Secondly, bilboed has already
> done a rough conversion, and knows what else needs to be done.  Thirdly,
> there are several (well-known) people who frequent the channel who are
> familiar with git, and at least one (myself) that has committed to being
> a newbie punching bag.
>
> Now, if someone (or two or three) dependable shows up and offers to do
> all of the above for another VCS, I'd be all for it.  bilboed and I have
> other projects we could be spending our time on.
>
>
>
> dave...
>
>
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[Jan Schmidt-6]

On Thu, 2008-07-10 at 09:55 +0100, Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller
wrote:

> I think Davids points basically sums up the discussion at the meeting.
> The discussion was not 'which is the ultimate VCS system' as such
> discussions tend to be completely useless and just means we end up
> staying with CVS due to lack of consensus for the forseeable future.
>
> The general agreement was that it was time to move on from CVS. We knew
> that there is wide agreement in the community about this. So the
> question came down to the kind of things that David listed.
>
> So if anyone wants to see GStreamer switch to something else than git,
> that is fine, but you need to start that discussion with two arguments:
>
> a) We (there needs to be more than one person knowing the system) are
> willing to spend the time and effort to do the conversion and help
> fellow developers with the conversion.
> b) This is something that the freedesktop sysadmins are able and willing
> to help us support.
>
> So while not everyone who where at the meeting loved git above
> everything else, the agreement was that if one wasn't willing or able to
> provide the above, one was only providing unconstructive stop energy.

Thanks, Christian - you said exactly what I wanted to say on this thread
and iterated the exact reason that I stopped resisting the people with
the energy and knowledge of git to actually move us there.

J.

>
> Christian
>
>
> On Wed, 2008-07-09 at 18:59 -0700, David Schleef wrote:
> > On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 01:49:18AM +0300, Ole André Vadla Ravnås wrote:
> > > So then I feel inclined to ask; why was this decision made without any
> > > technical discussion with all interested parties in the community?
> > ...
> >
> >
> > The reasons for choosing a new VCS are not technical.  There are
> > essentially only minor technical differences between the various
> > options.  An individual feature may seem very important to you, but
> > in the grand scheme of things, it probably isn't.  Everything has
> > its plusses and minuses.
> >
> > The reasons for choosing a particular VCS are:
> >
> >  - Do we have hosting available?  Are we (the main group of developers)
> >    familiar with the admins, know how to find them on IRC, know how to
> >    get them to do maintence, etc?  Does one of us have admin priviliges?
> >    Are there regular backups?
> >
> >  - Is there someone willing to invest the time (say, two weeks) to
> >    convert the repository, with all its warts, to the new VCS?
> >
> >  - Is there someone (preferably several people) willing to handhold
> >    anyone in the IRC channel to start using the new VCS?  Are they
> >    capable of nicely answering the same stupid questions 10 times
> >    per day?  Are they able to commit to being around for at least a
> >    few weeks?  Are they able to spend time researching more difficult
> >    problems as they arise?
> >
> > In each of those cases, the overwhelming choice is git.  Freedesktop.org
> > already uses git for most projects.  Secondly, bilboed has already
> > done a rough conversion, and knows what else needs to be done.  Thirdly,
> > there are several (well-known) people who frequent the channel who are
> > familiar with git, and at least one (myself) that has committed to being
> > a newbie punching bag.
> >
> > Now, if someone (or two or three) dependable shows up and offers to do
> > all of the above for another VCS, I'd be all for it.  bilboed and I have
> > other projects we could be spending our time on.
> >
> >
> >
> > dave...
> >
> >
> > -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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>
>
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--
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[Sebastian Dröge]

Am Donnerstag, den 10.07.2008, 01:49 +0300 schrieb Ole André Vadla
Ravnås:

> Hi all,
>
> As Julien pointed out there was a GStreamer summit at GUADEC on
> Sunday. Sadly for me I wasn't able to attend as I arrived in Istanbul
> one day too late. However, I just read Andy Wingo's blogpost[1] and
> was really surprised to learn about one topic discussed and decided
> upon there. It was decided to switch GStreamer from using CVS to git
> (as soon as some minor migration issues have been resolved).
>
> So then I feel inclined to ask; why was this decision made without any
> technical discussion with all interested parties in the community?
>
> I strongly object to this decision, and for one specific technical
> reason. git does not work acceptably on Windows, and this is caused by
> the basic design of its UI. It's a collection of shell-scripts, and
> thus it relies on MSYS or cygwin. Yes, it "works", but this is like
> telling people that MS Office supports Linux because you can run it
> through WINE.
>
> Doing GStreamer development on Windows has already got a high
> threshold for newcomers because of things like autotools, so can we
> please avoid switching our RCS to something equally orthogonal to
> Windows?

There are (apart from the msysgit implemention) two Mono SoC projects
for implementing GIT in C#. This should also be usable on Windows, if
msysgit isn't:

http://code.google.com/soc/2008/mono/appinfo.html?csaid=E6D8A717A88A7632
http://code.google.com/soc/2008/mono/appinfo.html?csaid=F2E71A4D93E7EF37


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[Ole André Vadla Ravnås]

Hi Felipe!

> On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 1:49 AM, Ole André Vadla Ravnås
> <[hidden email]> wrote:
...
>> I strongly object to this decision, and for one specific technical
>> reason. git does not work acceptably on Windows, and this is caused by
>> the basic design of its UI. It's a collection of shell-scripts, and
>> thus it relies on MSYS or cygwin. Yes, it "works", but this is like
>> telling people that MS Office supports Linux because you can run it
>> through WINE.
>
> Is msysgit not good enough? [1]

Last time I checked it requires you to run the supplied terminal with
the self-contained environment. Sort of like a UNIX system in a
nutshell (shell scripts depend on coreutils and other things). This is
obviously not very Windows-friendly, and raises the bar for newcomers
even higher than it already is.

>> I am however not too certain that it'll be possible to agree on one
>> DRCS, so maybe it'd be better to just stick with a centralized RCS and
>> use mirrored branches like quite a few of you are already doing today?
>
> At first I thought that was a good idea, but now that I understand git
> better I see that things are smoother when everything is in git.

This sounds like a tool problem. Maybe if we moved to SVN it would
implicitly fix this? At least this is seamless when using bazaar, and
if it isn't already with git it should be fixed there IMO.

> In any case there's a bzr plugin that allows you to interact with git,
> right? There's no reason to have a central repository in svn, so
> people can use git-svn and bzr-svn when we can skip the svn part. I
> don't know about hg, but I don't think many people advocate it in
> GStreamer.

There's one in development, currently at pre-alpha and not yet usable.
Once it's been fully implemented and mature I would be more than happy
with a switch, as that would make git's UI a first-class
Windows-citizen. (Personally I've got nothing against git, it just
isn't ready for Windows yet.)

Cheers,
Ole André

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[Ole André Vadla Ravnås]

On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 2:14 AM, Sean Estabrooks <[hidden email]> wrote:

> On Thu, 10 Jul 2008 01:49:18 +0300
> "Ole André Vadla Ravnås" <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
>> I strongly object to this decision, and for one specific technical
>> reason. git does not work acceptably on Windows, and this is caused by
>> the basic design of its UI. It's a collection of shell-scripts, and
>> thus it relies on MSYS or cygwin. Yes, it "works", but this is like
>> telling people that MS Office supports Linux because you can run it
>> through WINE.
>
> This isn't really true.  There are multiple projects which already make Git
> use on MSWin acceptable.  You don't need to install Cygwin, Git installs
> just like any other application and runs just fine:
>
>    http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/
>
> There are some GUI tools being developed and there is a almost-full version
> of Git now developed in Java which can be incorporated into the Eclipse IDE
> etc.  On top of which, Git isn't just a collection of shell scripts any longer, they're
> being converted over to C one by one.

I'm aware that things are in heavy development, and that's really
promising. However, for those of us stuck doing GStreamer development
on this broken platform it's less of an option to put our current
efforts on hold, or reduce our productivity by having to fix bugs in
tools that aren't quite there yet. There's certainly enough
interesting problems to solve with the code itself on this platform,
and personally I'm already bogged down with maintenance of another
build system (because autotools isn't usable for day-to-day
development on Windows), and introducing even more tools that aren't
there yet on the portability-side will just make things even less
productive.

I think git has a lot of potential, but I don't think that /now/ is
the right time to switch. I'd say give it a few months and then
re-evaluate.

Cheers,
Ole André

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[Ole André Vadla Ravnås]

On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 4:59 AM, David Schleef <[hidden email]> wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 01:49:18AM +0300, Ole André Vadla Ravnås wrote:
>> So then I feel inclined to ask; why was this decision made without any
>> technical discussion with all interested parties in the community?
> ...
>
>
> The reasons for choosing a new VCS are not technical.  There are
> essentially only minor technical differences between the various
> options.  An individual feature may seem very important to you, but
> in the grand scheme of things, it probably isn't.  Everything has
> its plusses and minuses.

...

I completely agree, and I'm sorry if my poor phrasing got this
discussion off on the wrong foot. What I meant by 'technical
discussion' wasn't to find 'the ultimate DRCS', because there is none
(they all have their pros and cons), but also take into account the
client side implications and not only the server-side ones. If a
particular choice makes development on one particular platform heavily
impaired, and makes it harder to get fresh blood on board on that
platform, that's a technical reason why such a decision might not be
the greatest idea, at least for the time being.

> In each of those cases, the overwhelming choice is git.  Freedesktop.org
> already uses git for most projects.  Secondly, bilboed has already
> done a rough conversion, and knows what else needs to be done.  Thirdly,
> there are several (well-known) people who frequent the channel who are
> familiar with git, and at least one (myself) that has committed to being
> a newbie punching bag.

It is certainly true that git is used for a lot of freedesktop.org
projects, but to most of them Windows is an irrelevant OS, or a really
minor one only used through emulation layers like Cygwin. If the
developers are okay with a full-blown POSIX system on top of Windows
to build and run things, then git's certainly fine and probably a very
good choice.

Cheers,
Ole André

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[Ole André Vadla Ravnås]

On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 11:55 AM, Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller
<[hidden email]> wrote:

> I think Davids points basically sums up the discussion at the meeting.
> The discussion was not 'which is the ultimate VCS system' as such
> discussions tend to be completely useless and just means we end up
> staying with CVS due to lack of consensus for the forseeable future.
>
> The general agreement was that it was time to move on from CVS. We knew
> that there is wide agreement in the community about this. So the
> question came down to the kind of things that David listed.
>
> So if anyone wants to see GStreamer switch to something else than git,
> that is fine, but you need to start that discussion with two arguments:
>
> a) We (there needs to be more than one person knowing the system) are
> willing to spend the time and effort to do the conversion and help
> fellow developers with the conversion.
> b) This is something that the freedesktop sysadmins are able and willing
> to help us support.

I'm certainly not against switching to git per se, I just think it's a
bad idea to switch to it until the aforementioned issue has been
resolved. I completely agree that people all have their preferences,
and thus it becomes meaningless to discuss which DVCS to pick. It's a
bit like getting all the developers to agree on a common musical
taste. :)

> So while not everyone who where at the meeting loved git above
> everything else, the agreement was that if one wasn't willing or able to
> provide the above, one was only providing unconstructive stop energy.

Couldn't agree more, and I'm sorry if my post got mis-interpreted as
yet another 'you chose git, I wanted $DVCS' kind of rant, because that
was not the intention. As I said I'm all for switching to git once it
is usable for the less fortunate of us, and not only those of you
running proper OSes. :)

Cheers,
Ole André

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[Ole André Vadla Ravnås]

On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 12:52 PM, Sebastian Dröge
<[hidden email]> wrote:
> Am Donnerstag, den 10.07.2008, 01:49 +0300 schrieb Ole André Vadla
> Ravnås:
...

>> I strongly object to this decision, and for one specific technical
>> reason. git does not work acceptably on Windows, and this is caused by
>> the basic design of its UI. It's a collection of shell-scripts, and
>> thus it relies on MSYS or cygwin. Yes, it "works", but this is like
>> telling people that MS Office supports Linux because you can run it
>> through WINE.
>>
>> Doing GStreamer development on Windows has already got a high
>> threshold for newcomers because of things like autotools, so can we
>> please avoid switching our RCS to something equally orthogonal to
>> Windows?
>
> There are (apart from the msysgit implemention) two Mono SoC projects
> for implementing GIT in C#. This should also be usable on Windows, if
> msysgit isn't:
>
> http://code.google.com/soc/2008/mono/appinfo.html?csaid=E6D8A717A88A7632
> http://code.google.com/soc/2008/mono/appinfo.html?csaid=F2E71A4D93E7EF37

This looks really promising! I'm really looking forward to switching
from cvs as soon as it's usable (looks like the most promising effort
thus far). cvs is after all cvs, and anything distributed will be a
really good thing for the project IMO. :)

Cheers,
Ole André

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[Sean Estabrooks]

On Thu, 10 Jul 2008 13:54:32 +0300
"Ole André Vadla Ravnås" <[hidden email]> wrote:

> I'm aware that things are in heavy development, and that's really
> promising. However, for those of us stuck doing GStreamer development
> on this broken platform it's less of an option to put our current
> efforts on hold, or reduce our productivity by having to fix bugs in
> tools that aren't quite there yet. There's certainly enough
> interesting problems to solve with the code itself on this platform,
> and personally I'm already bogged down with maintenance of another
> build system (because autotools isn't usable for day-to-day
> development on Windows), and introducing even more tools that aren't
> there yet on the portability-side will just make things even less
> productive.

Git is a healthy project with lots of active development so things are
improving all the time.  But that's not to say that the current version
of Git on Windows is unacceptable.  Do you have any specific complaints
against the current implementation?

Sean

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[Jan Schmidt-6]

On Thu, 2008-07-10 at 13:54 +0300, Ole André Vadla Ravnås wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 2:14 AM, Sean Estabrooks <[hidden email]> wrote:
> > On Thu, 10 Jul 2008 01:49:18 +0300
> > "Ole André Vadla Ravnås" <[hidden email]> wrote:
> >
> >> I strongly object to this decision, and for one specific technical
> >> reason. git does not work acceptably on Windows, and this is caused by
> >> the basic design of its UI. It's a collection of shell-scripts, and
> >> thus it relies on MSYS or cygwin. Yes, it "works", but this is like
> >> telling people that MS Office supports Linux because you can run it
> >> through WINE.
> >
> > This isn't really true.  There are multiple projects which already make Git
> > use on MSWin acceptable.  You don't need to install Cygwin, Git installs
> > just like any other application and runs just fine:
> >
> >    http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/
> >
> > There are some GUI tools being developed and there is a almost-full version
> > of Git now developed in Java which can be incorporated into the Eclipse IDE
> > etc.  On top of which, Git isn't just a collection of shell scripts any longer, they're
> > being converted over to C one by one.
>
> I'm aware that things are in heavy development, and that's really
> promising. However, for those of us stuck doing GStreamer development
> on this broken platform it's less of an option to put our current
> efforts on hold, or reduce our productivity by having to fix bugs in
> tools that aren't quite there yet. There's certainly enough
> interesting problems to solve with the code itself on this platform,
> and personally I'm already bogged down with maintenance of another
> build system (because autotools isn't usable for day-to-day
> development on Windows), and introducing even more tools that aren't
> there yet on the portability-side will just make things even less
> productive.
>
> I think git has a lot of potential, but I don't think that /now/ is
> the right time to switch. I'd say give it a few months and then
> re-evaluate.

We're not actually talk about switching this week - more a consensus
that git is what we're moving to and let's get started on it. When we
actually switch (I would say 1-2 months away), it'll be after we've done
trial runs of the conversion and checked it works, and notified people
of the cutoff dates so they can plan to move over smoothly etc.

At this stage, Tim & Edward are investigating the conversion process.
They need to identify the sequence to use, and we need to make sure that
there is sufficient support (wiki pages, IRC people) to help people like
me who've hardly used git before learn (at least) the equivalents for
the CVS commands I regularly use.

J.

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[Jan Schmidt-6]

On Thu, 2008-07-10 at 08:10 -0400, Sean Estabrooks wrote:

> On Thu, 10 Jul 2008 13:54:32 +0300
> "Ole André Vadla Ravnås" <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> > I'm aware that things are in heavy development, and that's really
> > promising. However, for those of us stuck doing GStreamer development
> > on this broken platform it's less of an option to put our current
> > efforts on hold, or reduce our productivity by having to fix bugs in
> > tools that aren't quite there yet. There's certainly enough
> > interesting problems to solve with the code itself on this platform,
> > and personally I'm already bogged down with maintenance of another
> > build system (because autotools isn't usable for day-to-day
> > development on Windows), and introducing even more tools that aren't
> > there yet on the portability-side will just make things even less
> > productive.
>
> Git is a healthy project with lots of active development so things are
> improving all the time.  But that's not to say that the current version
> of Git on Windows is unacceptable.  Do you have any specific complaints
> against the current implementation?
>

I've been trying out msysgit on XP this morning. The biggest stumbling
block by far seems to be support for ssh keys. It's an essential feature
for us (the only available access method to git.freedesktop.org), but so
far seems to only be support by either using the msys command line
client only, or by jumping through hoops to configure
Putty/Pageant/Plink as the ssh binary msysgit uses (I haven't yet been
able to get this to work, but I saw it working and am trying).

An alternate and very interesting option for the transition that Thadeu
mentioned is to configure a git-cvsserver on fdo. This allows (at least)
almost all the functions *I* need for working with GStreamer. It misses
the ability to tag/branch/merge, but I only do those because I'm doing
the releases. As far as I know, everyone else only checks out, updates
(possibly to a tagged revision), checks diffs and commits - and it seems
like a viable option for those. This would be a good way to completely
avoid the 'Windows' problem while the tools mature.

J.

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[Sean Estabrooks]

On Thu, 10 Jul 2008 14:00:52 +0100
Jan Schmidt <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi Jan,

> I've been trying out msysgit on XP this morning. The biggest stumbling
> block by far seems to be support for ssh keys. It's an essential feature
> for us (the only available access method to git.freedesktop.org), but so
> far seems to only be support by either using the msys command line
> client only, or by jumping through hoops to configure
> Putty/Pageant/Plink as the ssh binary msysgit uses (I haven't yet been
> able to get this to work, but I saw it working and am trying).

It already works transparently if you just use a key without a passphrase.
If you're forced into using a passphrase then you're right, to use the GUI
you must do a little setup first.  But none of this should be a big hurdle
to overcome, it's a one-time setup thing not an ongoing problem.  Perhaps
we could create a little how-to so that everyone doesn't have to rediscover
the process for themselves.

> An alternate and very interesting option for the transition that Thadeu
> mentioned is to configure a git-cvsserver on fdo. This allows (at least)
> almost all the functions *I* need for working with GStreamer. It misses
> the ability to tag/branch/merge, but I only do those because I'm doing
> the releases. As far as I know, everyone else only checks out, updates
> (possibly to a tagged revision), checks diffs and commits - and it seems
> like a viable option for those. This would be a good way to completely
> avoid the 'Windows' problem while the tools mature.

Seems a bit of a shame to have to stay on CVS and not get any of the
advantages of using Git but it might help smooth things over during
a transition.  However as far as i know, fdo doesn't currently run the
Git cvs gateway, so it would require someone to do that work.

Sean

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[Jan Schmidt-6]

On Thu, 2008-07-10 at 14:00 +0100, Jan Schmidt wrote:
>
> I've been trying out msysgit on XP this morning. The biggest stumbling
> block by far seems to be support for ssh keys. It's an essential feature
> for us (the only available access method to git.freedesktop.org), but so
> far seems to only be support by either using the msys command line
> client only, or by jumping through hoops to configure
> Putty/Pageant/Plink as the ssh binary msysgit uses (I haven't yet been
> able to get this to work, but I saw it working and am trying).
>

Actually, I got this working. I needed to install all the putty tools,
to have Putty, Pageant, Puttygen and plink.

I used puttygen to import my fdo openssh key and save it as a Putty PPK
file, then loaded it into pageant. Next, I set a couple of windows
environment variables:

GIT_SSH=C:\Program Files\Putty\plink.exe
PLINK_PROTOCOL=ssh

Next, I used the Putty GUI to log in to my fdo account, because I needed
to be able to click the 'yes, allow and remember this server key', which
I can't do when GIT logs in, but once it is done things are ok.

Then, I was able to use git-gui to clone a repository (I tried with
cairo), and I've got a tree I can use, and it's been checked out with
CRLF line endings, which is nice. The clone itself took a really long
time (> 1 hour), but I think that is the really bad network here at
GUADEC, or caused by the fact I'm doing all this in a VM, and not a
symptom of an inherent performance problem of msysgit.

J.
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[Sean Estabrooks]

On Thu, 10 Jul 2008 15:50:01 +0100
Jan Schmidt <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi Jan,

> Actually, I got this working. I needed to install all the putty tools,
> to have Putty, Pageant, Puttygen and plink.
>
> I used puttygen to import my fdo openssh key and save it as a Putty PPK
> file, then loaded it into pageant. Next, I set a couple of windows
> environment variables:
>
> GIT_SSH=C:\Program Files\Putty\plink.exe
> PLINK_PROTOCOL=ssh
>
> Next, I used the Putty GUI to log in to my fdo account, because I needed
> to be able to click the 'yes, allow and remember this server key', which
> I can't do when GIT logs in, but once it is done things are ok.

As a comparison, here are the steps i followed (won't work if you're using
a passphrase) :

 -  Installed the featured version of Git, accepting all default install options
     from:  http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/downloads/list

 -  Copied my key files and known_hosts file from a Linux box into
     C:\Documents and Settings\sean\.ssh\

 -  Started Git-Gui and clicked on Clone Existing Repository
     and everything worked as expected from there including pushes.

> Then, I was able to use git-gui to clone a repository (I tried with
> cairo), and I've got a tree I can use, and it's been checked out with
> CRLF line endings, which is nice. The clone itself took a really long
> time (> 1 hour), but I think that is the really bad network here at
> GUADEC, or caused by the fact I'm doing all this in a VM, and not a
> symptom of an inherent performance problem of msysgit.

Must be a GUADEC network issue as you suspected.  Tested here
under a KVM virtual machine and it took a little under 7 minutes
to clone the Cairo repo on XP.   Under Linux it took about six and a
half minutes, so the Git client seems to perform quite well on XP.

Sean

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