Hi, a short summary of the Git BOF on OLS which finished just a short while ago. We got to hear how Len Brown is doing things and where Git gets in the way for him as well as interesting questions and comments from several other people. The main highlights as I feel them (mixed randomly with my personal blabbering) are that: (i) We should somehow separate the lowlevel Git commands from the highlevel ones meant for user consumption. There's too many of them and it is confusing for the users. Similarity with BitKeeper was pointed out (and I refrained from mentioning GNU Arch). (ii) We should document the workflows better. Currently there is a huge variety of workflows spread accross the Git user community, probably stemming from the fact that the UI evolved so fast while already "on the fly". Of course it shows that the Git tools are really flxible and versatile, but it might also mean that we are not abstracting some operations enough, or not selling the easier user interface better. Anyway, new users might find the current mix of workflows used across the community somewhat intimidating. This also means that.... (iii) ...we should spread the word about StGIT more (because StGIT is cool and often does just what people want to do with Git and it's clumsy), more so because... (iv) ...we should support mutating history better (I think this is the most important point). There is a kind of conflict here: * Fundamentally, Git considers history to be immutable, especially if you publish it. * The kernel workflow encourages the opposite - the subsystem maintainers are rebasing all the time as well as just generally retouching their history (typos, fixing bugs in the patches etc). This problem can be separated to two areas: * Support for the history mutation. We have some nice tools in Git for rebasing, but it would be nice to support the other modifications easier as well. I suggested having a tool you just tell a commit id and it will let you modify the author info, the associated patch or fold another patch in... Also, using StGIT obviously hlps a lot here. * Support for distributing and following the mutated history. I'm actually not sure about the level of Git support for this, Cogito supports cg-updating to a mutated history if you have no local changes. Please feel free to add things if I have missed anything. Happy hacking, -- Petr "Pasky" Baudis Stuff: http://pasky.or.cz/ Snow falling on Perl. White noise covering line noise. Hides all the bugs too. -- J. Putnam - : send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html