[Scummvm-devel] Switching from SVN to git, mercurial or bazaar

Kostas Nakos knakos at phys.uoa.gr
Mon Jun 8 15:50:23 CEST 2009


Filippos Karapetis wrote:
> Well, git is still problematic under Windows (and probably under exotic 
> platforms such as AmigaOS). So, although it does have many strengths, 
> the focus it has on *nix platforms is a bit minus, imho. Plus, Mercurial 
> does have the aforementioned ability, if I'm not mistaken.

"problematic", as stated before, reflects one's own modus operandi. I am 
forced to work in Windows for the port and I have absolutely no problems 
working with git in cygwin, and using the stock installation (read: 
available cygwin package) btw.

> In the end of the day, branching doesn't happen very often in ScummVM 
> (i.e. once every 6 months for releases and once every year for GSoC), so 
> that's probably not the killer feature that will urge us move on to git...

No, that's a svn/cvs distorted point of view for branch/merge. The 
meaning it takes in git is that one single trivial feature can be made 
into a branch which then can be merged extremely easy. To do something 
like that with cvs/svn one has to create a branch in a public repo 
directory then merge it later (good luck with that) and probably delete 
it later on if all developers do stuff like that. So what's good here is 
that you can start working on super-cool feature X in a branch, then 
stop working for Y weeks on it, create other branches, fix stuff etc, 
and then go back to X. All that with only local repository operations. 
That's it; you can keep a feature on the backburner for a long time 
without having to do multiple checkouts while you work on other stuff.

K.




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