Re: GNA Shutting Down?

[David Chisnall]

On 5 Feb 2017, at 10:49, Riccardo Mottola <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> I happen to have used git more since we made the decision and I can still 
> only write I dislike it. There is only one way to describe the way it 
> interfaces, handles errors, conflicts and similar: braindead. One could 
> almost think it is made to be unfriendly. At the time of CVS issues were due 
> to its brittle foundation, but now there is no excuse.

Ironically, the terrible interface for git is actually one of its strengths.  
The CLI for subversion is bad, so people put up with it.  The CLI for git is 
completely atrocious, so people wrote better tools to avoid having to deal with 
it.

I use GitX on OS X and gitg on other systems.  They let me graphically find 
parts of a large change set that are logically connected and add them to 
smaller commits before pushing.  Getting used to a git workflow also means 
doing frequent checkpoint commits and then using git rebase -i to fold them 
back into logical units before pushing.

> Anyway, I agree with you, having SVN as a checkout way is very nice, as well 
> as way to create patches. Two-way would be nice, but I would be happy to have 
> a "read-only" checkout using SVN (or even CVS?) since it would be handy to 
> test, compile and generate patches on certain computers with more exotic 
> setups. Afterwards a commit could be pushed by a computer actually having GIT 
> after having applied the patch. Cumbersome, but would do for me.
> Apparently the SVN frontend is easily available only on github.

GitHub’s svn interface isn’t perfect, but it does work reasonably well.  It’s 
mostly useful for being able to do a sparse checkout.  For example, you can do:

svn co https://github.com/gnustep/libobjc2.git/trunk/Test

And get just the tests from libobjc2 (not a useful example, particularly).  
Even better, you can use this with git-svn to get sparse checkouts with git.

> It *itches* for me to ask people to have a github account to work on the 
> project, I'd really prefer savannah.

I don’t disagree.  I was a long-time GitHub holdout, to the extent that I even 
refused for a while to get a GitHub account for paid work on a GitHub-hosted 
project.  I don’t like the degree of centralisation.  That said, my main 
objection to this kind of site is the lock in, and GitHub is pretty good in 
this regard:

- The code is in git, which is trivial to move elsewhere (you do as a side 
effect of using git).

- The Wiki is stored as a git repo, so trivial to move elsewhere (and also has 
the really nice side effect that I don’t have to use a web-based editor for it, 
I can clone the wiki repo, edit the Markdown files in vim, and push them).  
This also means that it’s trivial to locally mirror the wiki for offline use.

- The issue tracker can export to JSON and there are scripts available for 
importing into other systems.

David