[Scilab-Dev] Re: Re: Leaving SVN to GIT

[Sylvestre Ledru]

Hello Barry,

Nice to have new people coming into the discussion. ;)
(Jonathan, I am also trying to answer to your questions in this email)

First, if you have time, listening Linus talking about git is a
pleasure: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8

> What we need prior to making a firm decision on this is a document
> that clearly illustrates the desired work flow, pointing out how GIT
> enables this work flow and how SVN doesn't. Further to this a
> discussion on you vision for the future work flow is also necessary.
Moving to git is not for fun or to be fashion. It has a cost and it is
harder than SVN to use.

Our main concern here is more about organisation than technical.

The gap between version 4.X & 5.0 was much too long. We don't want to
reproduce the same "mistake". Therefor, we need to be able to work on
two versions in the meantime.

For the next year and half coming, we will be working on three versions:
The 5.0.X, 5.X and 6.0
Keeping track of changes, we need to push the changes from one version
to the other but we also need a new structure. 

Let me take an example. 
We have a few people who are currently working on rewriting the core of
Scilab (rewriting gateways, memory management, parser, etc).
We obviously cannot put these changes into the current trunk of Scilab.
It is a long work. 
But we do need a few things:
* this stuff must be synchronized with the actual trunk (bug fix, new
features)
* let other people get access to this branch. For example, I am not
working on this for now but I would like to be able to checkout this and
use for some experiments (I love getting seg faults ;).
* we can experiment stuffs quickly and easily together. An other
example, I am going to work on a new Scilab-MPI version. Yann Collette
asked me to have a look asap on this. Thanks to git, I will just have to
publish my branch and that's it. I won't have to worry to sync with the
main trunk and the v6.X version (I will probably needs improvement from
both).

Of course, I won't compare Scilab with the Linux Kernel but I like the
idea of organisation which drives the dev of Linux. Sorry for the URL, I
had a better example but I cannot find it right now [1]:
http://www.firstmonday.org/Issues/issue10_5/iannacci/#i3
(Don't look this graph is term of person but more in term of "version").
If I am unclear here, let me know :)

About the fact that there is no good click-click-double-clik Windows
client for Git, I admit that it is an issue... but not a blocker issue
for us (at least for now).

Sylvestre

[1] Well, I am lying here, I know a better one but it is in a video:
http://www.free-electrons.com/pub/video/2008/ols/ols2008-james-bottomley-git.ogg