Re: Git vs SVN (was: Can we improve things?)

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com>]

On Sat, 2007-09-08 at 10:17 +0200, Olav Vitters wrote:

Hi, Olav,

> You are ignoring the central place. You need somewhere all GNOME devs
> are able to commit. This is what is so wrong about
> www.gnome.org/~foo/git/.

The interesting question is, "why are people doing ~foo/git/blah in the
first place?"

Because it is no longer possible to create new SVN modules easily, as it
was when we used CVS.  By "easily" I mean that it you want to create a
module, you don't need to ask anyone to do it for you.

Think of a gnome.org developer who has just written a new and exciting
program, and wants to make it available.  You are in that beautiful
moment when the program works well enough that you want to show it
around, and you are pumped up!  The only thing that goes through your
mind is publish, publish, publish!

So you start writing an exciting blog post full of nice screenshots and
plans, and you write "you can get MyProg at svn.gnome.org/svn/..."

Oh, shit.  Giant brick wall.  You cannot create the module by yourself.
You google for "gnome creating new svn modules" and you get pointed to
http://developer.gnome.org/tools/svn.html - which leads you to
http://developer.gnome.org/doc/tutorials/import.html if you want to
import your code, but THAT WON'T WORK because it still talks about "cvs
import".

Okay... so you know that the developer's site is pretty bad and
outdated, so you go to check the wiki.  Go to live.gnome.org and type
"svn" in the search box.  Great, the first search hit is
http://live.gnome.org/NewSVNRepos - which tells you "mail an admin with
this list of requirements".  Download page?  Project homepage?  Come on,
this is my first "it barely works" release - I don't have all that set
up yet!

So you are stuck.  Ask an admin to create a new module?  That will take
days.  Your energy and happiness go to hell.

It is very sad that even if you already have an SVN account, you cannot
create a module by yourself.

Back when we used CVS, anyone with an account could do "cvs import",
just as described in the developer's site.  People botched it up and
imported generated files, etc., but that could be easily fixed.

People are using ~foo/git/bar because *it works* without having to ask
someone else to import your code for you.

  Federico