RFC: migrating to git

[Simon Marlow]

On 11/01/2011 23:11, Roman Leshchinskiy wrote:
> On 11/01/2011, at 22:20, Simon Marlow wrote:
>
>> On 11/01/11 21:57, Roman Leshchinskiy wrote:
>>> IMO, darcs-all works pretty well. I don't think I ever really had
>>> problems with missing library patches.
>>
>> I often see problems where someone has done 'darcs pull' rather than './darcs-all pull' and ended up with a weird compilation error as a result.  If we could eliminate this source of errors, it would be a major win.
>
> A quick look at the docs seems to indicate that we'd need to do
>
> git pull
> git submodule update
>
> which doesn't look like a win over darcs-all. Also, I completely fail to understand what git submodule update does. It doesn't seem to pull all patches from the master repo. The git submodule docs are even worse than the rest of the git docs which is rather discouraging.

True, however the build system could automatically check whether you had 
missed this step, because it could check the hashes.

>>> This would be useful. Unfortunately, git's rewinding seems rather
>>> crippled compared to darcs.
>>
>> In what way?
>
> Thomas says that it doesn't do automatic dependency tracking which looks like a huge weakness to me. Personally, I haven't been able to successfully unpull non-consecutive chunks of patches with git so far but I only tried 2 or 3 times before giving up.

Right, not being able to automatically commute patches is a regression 
compared to darcs.  Git isn't universally "better" than darcs, which is 
why we're having this discussion - the question is, do the advantages 
outweigh the disadvantages.  For example, you might well consider the 
lack of a working annotate to be a "huge weakness" in darcs, and the 
lack of good conflict handling is something that causes us real problems.

Cheers,
	Simon