[llvm-dev] Switching to git (Windows experience) (was re:[cfe-dev] GitHub anyone?)

[Renato Golin via llvm-dev]

On 3 June 2016 at 10:03, George Rimar via llvm-dev
<llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> +1. I am also bit concerned here. Never used git, but it is fine, I am ready to learn,
> but now when I am using TortoiseSVN the only command line I am using is for creating the
> final patch (though I think that is also available in GUI).
> And what I heard in this threads that almost all using only command line for working with git. That
> is really different workflow approach.

This is not true. There are a lot of GUIs for git, even more so than
for SVN. If an outdated tool like TortoiseSVN is enough for LLVM's
purposes, I'm sure there will be some Git GUI that will be good
enough.

I am reading a few people using TortoiseSVN afraid of the change. I
understand the feeling, but now we're looking for technical arguments,
not personal ones. So, what I recommend is for people to try out other
GUIs on LLVM's Git and see how it goes.

I'm also not asking anyone to move to a console based approach, nor
I've seen anyone doing that. What people did was to show their
workflow, which most of it happens to be on the console. And, since
GUIs are just wrappers to command-line tools, if it is possible on the
command-line, it's possible that some GUI tool will be able to do it.
And the reverse is also true, if we can't do it on console, GUIs won't
do it either, and we can't move to Git only.

That's all there is to it.


> I guess people here can be divided on those who using/used both svn and git and
> familar with both. Or a minor part, but still some group that are familar with svn only.

Why do you assume that everyone should be familiar with SVN?

Using Git-SVN doesn't automatically make someone familiar with SVN, as
much as using GitHub doesn't make you familiar with Git. You can use
GitHub for years and have no idea how to do anything else in Git, and
still be a perfectly good developer. That's the power of those tools.


> I think latter group just reads this thread and do not leave comments, just because unfamilar with git
> enough to do that.

I seriously encourage those people to step forward and try out Git
tools, command-line and GUIs, as well as GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, or
anything else for that matter.

The workflow will change under Git, of course it will. But that
doesn't mean you'll be unable to work or understand what you're doing.

As a thought experiment, let's suppose we moved from SVN/Git to only
SVN. Do you think the workflow would be identical to everybody else
that uses Git-SVN?

It's not because people use Git-SVN that they work like SVN. All Git
users use Git-SVN because they work like Git, and only the final
commit goes to SVN because *legacy*.



> Tanya Lattner and Anton Korobeynikov wrote about some kind of survey that can bring on top
> the real distribution of opinions, I think this idea was good, if that is a point of interest.

They were actually being proactive in trying to understand how the
final move decision would happen, not trying to force people to take
decisions before all the technical issues are solved. These threads
are not about personal opinions any more, they're about technical
issues.

As I loosely collected from the previous (opinion) thread, there were
about 80% of the people strongly in favour, with some 10% undecided
and 10% against. If we were *only* to take those odds, the fairest
thing to do would be to move unconditionally to Git.

But we can't ignore the technical details. All Git supporters are
doing now, is to find a workflow that is sane under Git-only. If we
can't find one, there's no point in moving. If we can, *then* we'll do
the poll.

As someone said earlier, this is not about Git vs. SVN. It's about the
current workflow vs. some future unknown one. Until we know what the
future workflow looks like, I will personally not vote to move to
Git-Only.

Makes sense?

cheers,
--renato