[LLVMdev] svn mirror git?

[dag at cray.com]

Greg Fitzgerald <garious at gmail.com> writes:

>> I've yet to see anyone propose this.

Oh, many people have proposed using git's features.

> Then I'll be the first.  :)
>
> The benefit is that the review process would require no file copies or
> email attachments, shorter email conversations, no copying code during
> reviews to simulate inline comments, and no need to "git rebase" to
> push to the top of svn. 

I'm not sure this is actually true.  Yes, you can ask people to pull
your changes and review them, but that misses the value of other people
chiming in when they see your code on the e-mail list.

And for practicality, "git rebase" will almost certainly be necessary
before pushing to upstream master.

>  I wouldn't be surprised if the difference was so significant that
> folks would stop using the llvm-commits list altogether.  To see what
> changed, you'd check the github mirror, and to contribute you could
> post a link to llvmdev (not too noisy).

I think a possibly more productive way to do reviews would be through
something like Gerrit.

I believe there are far more important git advantages for llvm, many
of which I have listed before.  These include but are not limited to:

- A natural system for small, incremental commits.  The svn model
  generally discourages this kind of development while the git model
  encourages it.

- Tools for responding to reviews.  These include git rebase -i and git
  add -i.

- Easier third-party merging.  Merging via git merge/rebase is MUCH
  simpler than merging a tarball from svn.  I know the llvm leaders
  don't seem to care about this but it is a real issue for many users.

- Ease of fork/merge.  git makes it easy to experiment with long-lived
  development branches.  svn forces all development into trunk which
  limits experimentation and innovation.

                            -David