Re: GIT and CVS

[ams at gnu dot org (Alfred M. Szmidt)]

   >> So why are we still on CVS?  I'm not a release manager, so I do not have
   >
   > Because the complications associated with having many projects in the same 
   > repository are a lot of work to disentangle, and it is a lot of work to do 
   > the conversion (including all the infrastructure scripts, user 
   > instructions etc.) for any one project.
   >
   > I think binutils+gdb is the right unit to aim for getting into a separate 
   > repository, as discussed in 
   > <http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2011-03/msg00486.html>.

   Ok, thanks for your response.  Beyond the reason why they were in
   the same repository for how many years, why do they still have to
   be?

Joseph mentioned other reasons as well, it isn't just because they
have been in a single tree for many years.  One other thing worth
mentioning is that unified source builds are immensly useful.

   I hack on GDB, and I really don't hack on much else.  This is not
   to diminish other projects, I just don't hack on them.  While other
   modules represented by other projects are important, I am trying to
   understand the reason why this is a blocker?  Building GDB requires
   a lot of dependencies outside of what is provided in the
   repository.

GDB only requires a normal POSIX system to compile.

   > ChangeLogs are very useful whatever the version control system;
   > it's routine to import snapshots from one system into another and
   > the ChangeLogs are readily available to see what source version
   > you actually have there.  ChangeLogs are convenient to grep and
   > much less I/O intensive than git operations are (especially when
   > your checkout is on NFS).

You can also fix ChangeLog entries after the fact, which is not
possible with git's commit messages.

   I nearly decided to delete that line from the email as I did not
   want to dilute the arguments.  I wrote the ChangeLog parser for
   Eclipse as I found ChangeLogs tiresome to write when history
   basically replaced it.  I must admit, even when I hack on emacs, it
   is still a pain.  I'll continue to do it, if people find it useful.
   However, git log is very, highly configurable.  The options are
   very broad.  And, as you can generate a git log from a local
   repository, the NFS thing should not be too difficult to overcome?

Could you explain how `git log' replaces ChangeLog? It doesn't do much
more than what `cvs log' does, so you still need to write which
function/variable was modified, and git log doesn't do that as far as
I know (it only lists which files, and how many lines where
added/delete which isn't very useful).