[LLVMdev] git

[Chris Lattner]

On Jul 22, 2011, at 10:55 PM, David A. Greene wrote:

>> 
>> What are the precise gains from changing the status quo? What can you
>> do by moving everything to Git that you couldn't do in the current
>> world with svn as master repository and the additional git mirror?
> 
> I work on a third-party branch.  I can sync with upstream and push our
> changes back to upstream nearly trivially with git.  With svn it is
> unpleasent, to say the least.
> 
> The centralized model is in many ways completely wrong for a codebase
> like LLVM which is explicitly expected to be forked and enhanced in
> proprietary ways.  By definition there will be many copies of the
> repository.  A DVCS allows everyone to keep those copies in sync.
> 
> To me this is the killer feature of any DVCS.

This is great, sounds like a handy feature, but I really don't care.

We are not fundamentally changing the development policy around LLVM.  This policy centers around small and incremental changes that are reviewed.  It includes the fact that trusted people have direct commit access to mainline.  In includes the fact that we have releases branched from mainline, and process around that.

I am completely uninterested in the linux kernel model, which assumes that everyone is trying to break things and which requires hierarchical pulling of trees.  Perhaps that models makes sense when the community is full of assholes :), but I'd rather solve the root problem and have a nice community instead developing a workflow around jerks.

Let me say this again: We are not fundamentally changing the development policy around LLVM.  If git doesn't offer advantages over SVN for our current workflow, then we should not switch to it.

-Chris