On Sat, Jan 29, 2011 at 2:46 AM, John Maddock
I still haven't heard from the git proponents, what's wrong with using git-svn to manage a local - i.e. distributed - git repository, and then periodically pushing changes to SVN. In other words working with git just as you normally would, except for having to type "git svn" from time to time? This isn't a rhetorical question BTW, I've never used either git or git-svn, so I clearly don't know what I'm missing ;-)
This doesn't change the Boost central repo which is actually one of the reasons why the current process doesn't scale well. The idea really (partially hashed out here, still a work in progress: https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/wiki/DistributedDevelopmentProcess) at least when I first brought it up is that we should be able to get multiple distributions, allow the independent but coordinated development of individual libraries, allow contributors to get into the game easier, and rely on an organic web of trust to allow for self-organization of sub-communities and a larger Boost community. Git is part of that idea mostly because the barrier to entry for potential contributors is 0. Anybody can absolutely clone the git repository, get development going locally, adding their contributions and submitting pull requests easily. The pull requests can go to maintainers, co-maintainers, the mailing list at large, or someone who's already a contributor to shepherd changes in. This allows all the work to happen in a distributed manner, with release management largely a matter of packaging publicly published versions of libraries that are tested to work well together in a single distribution. I just cannot imagine how this would be done with anything other than git that integrates the web of trust, organic fan-out growth of the self-organizing community, and rich set of tools and practices supporting it. Of course it's not just the git thing, it's also a workflow thing, and the distributed workflow along with the distributed version control system go hand-in-hand.
John.
PS, just looked at the git website, and it appears that us Windows users are restricted to either Cygwin or MSys builds? If so that appears to be a major drawback IMO.... OK I see there's a TortoiseGit, but it looks distinctly immature at first glance, and still depends on MSys (i.e. no easy integrated install)?
MSysGit is the best Git I've seen on Windows so far. I used it extensively on the command-line and had 0 problems working with it using the tutorials for Git on Linux. YMMV though. HTH -- Dean Michael Berris about.me/deanberris