Official git export

[Philip Paeps]

On 28 Aug 2011, at 23:18, Vadim Goncharov wrote:
> On Fri, 26 Aug 2011 10:06:32 +0100 (BST); Robert Watson wrote about 'Official git export (was: Re: FreeBSD problems and preliminary ways to solve)':
>> I have to admit I've always preferred Perforce to git, simply because it 
>> strikes me as a more structured approach, partial checkouts (but especially 
>> composition of different depot pieces in a single checkout to create hybrid 
>> trees), etc.  But git is widely used, and quite effectively used, by large 
>> communities.  We need to support those communities better.
> 
> I haven't worked with Perforce, do you mean I could checkout at once several
> directories e.g. sbin/ipfw and sys/netinet/ipfw in my working copy? If so,
> sounds good.

Yes.  Perforce is 'namespace-based'.  You map parts of the repository namespace
into your client namespace and work from there.  Branches are free for most
practical purposes and it's reasonably easy to merge between branches.

The main downside of Perforce is that the server likes to track every client's
files and that things get very shaky when you try to interfere with that
principle.  One of my customers uses Perforce without tracking (or tries to)
and it goes horribly wrong in a number of ways (gigantic "p4 have" databases,
which don't reflect reality, accidental "p4 sync -k" locking up the server
for everyone for hours,...).

> May be FreeBSD should really write it's own VCS, just as Git was
> modelled after proprietary BitKeeper?..

I think git is a very reasonable system and it should be possible to map the
way we work with FreeBSD into git.  As has been mentioned elsethread: things
would be a lot easier if we had "official git seeds" to pull from which
would make it easy to collaborate and then push things up into SVN.  Also, a
page of "rules for things not to do with git" would be helpful.  It would be
a bad idea if committers using git pushed changes into Subversion which made
subversion impossible to use (or much harder to use than it currently is).

 - Philip

-- 
Philip Paeps
Senior Reality Engineer
Ministry of Information