Proposals/feedback for a distributed version control system for cutecash?

[John Ralls]

On Mar 27, 2010, at 3:57 AM, Christian Stimming wrote:

> What is the experience around here with distributed version control systems 
> (VCS) for a project of our size? In the long run I'd like to continue the work 
> on the cutecash experiment outside of the gnucash SVN repository, and 
> preferrably in a distributed VCS. I'd like to collect some feedback about the 
> pros and cons of the distributed VCS systems around here...
> 
> Ideally, I'd like to find a hosting location with distributed VCS hosting 
> which automatically imports and tracks the gnucash/trunk SVN branch, though. 
> However, the only hosting place that supports this seems to be launchpad.net - 
> and their VCS is bazaar. (Hosting sites for git such as github.com at most 
> import a one-shot import from SVN, but no automatic continuous tracking.)
> 
> Even though I have got accustomed to git, I would have no problem with 
> switching to bazaar BUT when quickly giving this a try, I wasn't too happy 
> with some of its features.
> 
> Notably, I've grown accustomed to the "gitk" graphical overview of the recent 
> branch history. Browsing through all 18000 commits is done by key presses and 
> the GUI reacts instantly, showing the summary and full diff of any commit in a 
> reaction time that seems non-measurable. Even on a computer with a slow hard 
> disk. In contrast to this, "bzr qgit" seems to take longer by a factor of 10 
> when loading the window and also when browsing through the commits - which is 
> considerably less fun than with "gitk". Did other people experience this 
> differently?
> 
> Also, in git there is "git gui" which has the extremely cool feature of 
> staging (committing) only selected hunks of the current working copy diff. 
> When viewing the diff of the current working copy against the latest HEAD, I 
> can right-click on the single hunks that I'd like to commit, and leave the 
> rest of the file excluded from the new commit. Does bazaar have a GUI with a 
> similiar feature?
> 
> What would other devs around here choose as distributed VCS for a new project, 
> and why? Do you know of any hosting sites with that VCS that offers continuous 
> tracking of the original SVN branch?

Christian,

I'll note that both Linux and GNOME use git. They are both far larger projects than Gnucash, so scalability is very obviously not a concern. The only complaint I've heard about git is that it isn't well supported on MSWin; the author of that complaint (Vadim Zeitlin of wxWidgets, another very large project) preferred Hg -- until he spent some time with git and realized that its power and flexibility left Hg in the dust. 

I'm no fan of bzr, either.

It's a simple matter to set up a cron job on your own machine to run git-svn rebase && git push github as often as you like for keeping your github repo synchronized with the gnucash svn repo. (I'd be in favor of moving gnucash to git, but you'd still have to sync the repos if you're going to keep cutecash separate.)

Regards,
John Ralls