[Nix-dev] new possible movement to git (?)

[Evgeny Egorochkin]

On Wednesday 04 August 2010 13:23:31 Marc Weber wrote:
> Finally Eelco Dolstra replied to my question about introducing a
> official git mirror. I replied on irc so maybe his opinion can still
> change. Still I want to tell you about the small conversation:
> 
>   12:39 < MarcWeber> Eelco Dolstra: I'm still missing a reply. You didn't
>   tell us how you think about introducing an official git mirror for nixos
>   which can be used for preparing and sharing patches easier. I'd like to
>   know whether you are willing to provide a small account on one of the
>   nix* servers which runs a cron job once a day fetching from svn and
>   pusnhing to either github or gitorious. The scripts are ready.
> 
>   15:53 < Eelco Dolstra> MarcWeber: I'm currently more inclined to
>   converting to git than to setting up svn<->git mirrors
> 
> I would support this change this means:
> - I'll try to help each Nix(OS) user who has trouble with git to get
>   started.
> - I'll help rewriting existing scripts - if there is need to do so.
> 
> 
> If you want this to happen sooner I urge you to vote for this in this
> thread - I know that a lot of Nix(OS) users already have private git
> clones - including me.

+1. I use git-svn

> I still see the value of SVN checkouts - less size on disk - so maybe
> maintaining a svn mirror (for stable branch only?) is a good choice?

Git clone usually is just as fast or faster than a svn checkout. We might 
someday want a svn mirror but for now we probably can count on people having 
fat Internet connection, large HDDs(especially since nixos=storing several 
copies of the OS) and such.

Practical considerations today are: 
 * the initial git-svn checkout is incredibly slow and error-prone.
 * using svn without git is a pain.

> At this point I want to remind that github has a SVN interface for git
> repositories! Thus you can use git - but SVN users can still use SVN if
> they prefer. I haven't tested it yet - though.

Very likely there's some way to do it ourselves, but again if it's really 
needed. Many projects are moving to git, so you can count on contributors 
being familiar with it, or at least not being upset that yet another project 
uses git and they have to look up a begginer's how-to or something.

-- 
Evgeny