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

[Bertrand Augereau]

hg svn interaction was only for pulling, last time I checked, so you'd need two working copies, one hg and one svn, then some patching jugglery to send your commits to the svn repo.

<rant too :)>
I bet with tortoise svn I can do aggregate stuff such as "blame a file a.cpp at line 435 then see what was in the corresponding commit 34988 that touched it and then log changes in a.h which was touched in the same commit" faster than you with command-line :)</rant>

Anyway the most proficient users like you or me in an organisation are not important, they can manage :)
Other users are what count.

2 words about my experience:
I think for most users, windows shell integration is very important, and one of the most important problem with git.
We have roughly 25 coders and 25 "artists" (game designers, graphists and so on) developing in a windows environment.
Some coders don't want to lose the confort of TortoiseSvn and flawless shell and Araxis Merge integration.
The artists would just be befuzzled by the branching model, and anyway they mostly work on non-mergeable data, so a simplified workflow should be presented to them.
And hg and bzr just don't cut it performance wise with the size of our repo, so we're a bit stuck with svn in practice... and git svn (and therefore cygwin, msysgit doesn't fully support git svn).
A full git Windows experience should be smoother with msysgit.

By the way, git svn is nice and all, but there are lots of small quirks that necessitate to know git quite well to fix problems, such as a failed dcommit often necessitating inspecting the reflog to do the good reset.
So better not judge git through git svn.

Migrating a whole organisation to a DVCS really is a challenge not for the faint of the heart, mostly for non-technical reasons but not only.
ScummVM is essentially a project with coders (and geeky ones if I may) so it probably can be done!

Cheers,
Bertrand

--- En date de : Dim 7.6.09, Max Horn <max at quendi.de> a écrit :

> De: Max Horn <max at quendi.de>
> Objet: Re: [Scummvm-devel] Switching from SVN to git, mercurial or bazaar
> À: "Oystein Eftevaag" <wintermute at geheb.com>
> Cc: "ScummVM devel" <scummvm-devel at lists.sourceforge.net>
> Date: Dimanche 7 Juin 2009, 23h31
> 
> Am 07.06.2009 um 23:04 schrieb Oystein Eftevaag:
> 
> > A few people at work were evaluating this.
> >
> > Mercurial came out on top, since it has 1) Very good
> cross-platform
> > capabilities due to being written in python, instead
> of a weird mix of
> > perl and shell scripts and whatnot like git is, and 2)
> Better GUI
> > support than git, like TortoiseHG for instance.
> 
> <rant>
> Actually, I never understood the desire for these GUI
> tools, but  
> that's just me :). I tried using GUI frontends for CVS and
> SVN for  
> years, (in fact I started with one, since back then on
> MacOS 8, there  
> was simply no alternative to that ;). I never stay long,
> because,  
> well, I just type "git diff" quicker than it takes most of
> these tools  
> to update their fancy window with the list of files in the
> dir (which  
> I have to wait for before I can click the "diff" button,
> which then  
> opens a new window which renders data... in the meantime,
> in the  
> terminal I already finished scanning through the brief diff
> ;).
> </rant>
> 
> That said, I understand that support for Windows, and GUI
> tools, are  
> important for many tools, and I don't want to needlessly
> cripple their  
> ability to interact with the main ScummVM repository!
> 
> I actually did my first DVCS experiments with Mercurial,
> hoping that  
> it being python based, I would be able to setup my own
> mini-mercurial  
> server on my webspace (which supports Python). I never got
> that  
> working, but anyway, it certainly intrigues me.
> 
> The main reason for me to first try git *in depth*
> certainly was git- 
> svn; this tool, while far from perfect, allowed me to
> heavily test  
> git, while doing actual work on ScummVm (as opposed to any
> kind of  
> test repository, which I would never have hit as hard as I
> did this  
> way ;).
> 
> I just checked whether Mercurial has a similar bridge
> between itself  
> and SVN, and found this site: <http://blog.red-bean.com/sussman/? 
> p=116>. I'll take a look, if it does, I am going to
> install that, too,  
> and will run it in parallel to git-svn. And would encourage
> everybody  
> to do the same, to collect experience with either tool :).
> 
> 
> 
> > Bazaar wasn't really an
> > option, apparently, due to a more limited featureset
> (it's also used  
> > far
> > less than the other two alternatives, probably for
> just that reason).
> 
> In truth, I believe the reason that bazaar is less widely
> known and  
> spread has more to do with popularity of the existing DVCS
> solution;  
> with who was where first; marketing; it's close ties to
> Ubuntu/ 
> LaunchPad/Canonical, etc.. I.e. I think Bazaar is not that
> bad, but it  
> has nothing *really* compelling over Mercurial and git, and
> since  
> everybody is already talking about it, bazaar (and several
> other DVCS)  
> get somewhat neglected ;).
> 
> 
> Bye,
> Max
> 
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