Re: Switching from CVS to GIT

[Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de>]

Hi,

On Sun, 14 Oct 2007, Andreas Ericsson wrote:

> Benoit SIGOURE wrote:
> > Context: GNU make seems to be willing to switch from CVS to ... something
> > else.
> > 
> > On Oct 14, 2007, at 6:57 PM, Paul Smith wrote:
> > 
> > > [...] the big thing no one else seems to have addressed much in
> > > other discussions I've seen is portability.  It LOOKS like there are
> > > native ports of GIT to MINGW, but I have no idea how complete and usable
> > > they are.  If someone who has a Windows system could look into that it
> > > would be a big help.
> > 
> > I think the best thing to do is to ask directly on the Git ML.
> > 
> > Someone already pointed out that he'd like to use Git on Windows but 
> > doesn't want to install either Cygwin or MSYS.  Is this possible, or 
> > will it be possible in the near future?
> 
> It is sort of possible. Without cygwin he'll be in the black for the few 
> features that are still implemented as shell-scripts, but perhaps he/she 
> will then be inclined to help us migrate those scripts to C builtins.

Umm.  There are quite a few shell scripts still _necessary_ to run git: 
git-commit, git-fetch and git-merge being the most prominent ones.  The 
first two are in the process of being rewritten _right_ _now_, but no 
official git release has them yet.

And I have to disagree strongly with the "black": In msysGit (which brings 
its own minimal version of MSys), it is very smooth.

> >  Is it possible to use one of the various GUIs (git-gui, gitk, qgit) 
> > on Windows without requiring a POSIXish shell etc.?
> > 
> 
> qgit is possible to use natively, if one installs the qgit4 libraries 
> for windows, but it's more of a viewer than an action gui. git-gui and 
> gitk are usable if you have the windows TCL port. I haven't tried it, 
> but there are installers available, so testing it out (with all 
> dependencies) shouldn't take too long.

FWIW msysGit comes with Tcl.  You can run git gui and gitk without any 
hassles.

> > When will the librarification of Git be finished?
> 
> When someone gets around to doing it ;-)

There has been a GSoC project, and it has a nice small API which can be 
called from Python, for example.

Funnily enough, the first user is qgit as far as I know, which is written 
in C++...

> >  (if Git is available as a library, and if this library works on 
> > Windows, it will greatly help truly native Windows ports).
> 
> Yup. I believe the primary reason for libification is to easier support 
> both porting and fully-fledged gui's.

Why?

I do not see any reason why libification helps the user experience on 
Windows.

Ciao,
Dscho