Good morning git land! This dark and quiet Sunday night is as good an occasion as any to offer to you the 8th airing of the msysGit Herald, the not-quite-biweekly news letter to keep you informed about msysGit, the effort to bring one of the most powerful Source Code Management systems to the poor souls stuck with Windows. These are the covered topics: We have a working 'git svn' Interview with Christian Stimming GPL only needs to be acknowledged The installer was on diet core.autocrlf = true Update to a new ssh, problems with pulling msysGit Entering Babel: "rebase" git-cheetah is now a submodule Maybe I should strike the "not quite biweekly"? But then, it _is_ not quite biweekly ;-) Anyway, here it goes, the newest issue of the Herald, subtitle "Yeah, we have a working git svn!" We have a working 'git svn' =========================== Some time ago, we started work on compiling Perl ourselves, in order to be able to install the Subversion modules which are necessary to run 'git svn'. In the last issue of the Herald, I wrote something about our long and rocky road until we had a working 'git svn' (See the story "We managed to get git-svn to run!"). We played it safe, though, and had some alpha versions of a Git installer including 'git svn', and with good reason: Some testers came back and said that it would not work with https repositories, and that authentication was not supported. We included the necessary libraries and modules, cut a new Git installer, and the tests show that while it is slow, it works! While working on git-svn, we realized that there are a few scripts in msysGit that cannot possibly work (yet), so we excluded them from the Git installer. These scripts are: archimport, cvsexportcommit, cvsimport, cvsserver, filter-branch, instaweb, send-email, and shell. Interview with Christian Stimming ================================= Christian put in a big effort to get 'git svn' to work when I got stuck. He did such a great job, that I decided to interview him for the Herald, since I could not afford to buy him a house by way of saying thanks. So here it goes: > 1) How did you get involved with Git? Some fellow developer in another Open Source project mentioned it and was enthusiastic about this new way of working. As my main reason for being involved in Open Source is learning new things, this got me curious. > 2) What were the reasons that you started working on Git? In one project I had to work with a dead lame CVS server, where each contact to the repository took way way too long. Discovering that git would import all of the history and give me access to each and everything I wanted to know from the history brought back the fun into the project. From that moment on, I was hooked. > 3) What do you like most in Git? Speed. It's so fast, it's marvellous. This doesn't quite hold for the Windows version, but it is still faster than any other alternatives that I know of. And the GUI tools gitk and git-gui did a fantastic job of a low entry barrier - it's now really easy to start branching and merging a lot. > 4) What do you hate most in Git? The command line options. Sometimes it seems to me all the really cool actions in git can only be invoked by a mysterious collection of weird option switches which 1. I've never heard of, 2. are hidden deep down in long manual pages which make it impossible to distinguish important options from the unimportant ones, and 3. change very frequently in new versions. For example, "git rebase -i" is a nice feature, but it is simply a different action than a one-shot "git rebase". Hence, if it is supposed to be really used, it should rather be a command such as "git interactive-rebase". The GUI tools go a long way to hide those mysterious option collections, but some of the daily workflow steps are still unavailable in the GUI. Rebase being the most prominent, I guess. > 5) What was the most surprising moment when working with Git? Seeing it up and running on Windows just as well as on Linux. > 6) What was the most frustrating moment when working with Git? Finding that "git pull" will create many more merge commits than I wanted, and that there doesn't seem to be an easy way of running "git fetch; git rebase" in one command. All in all there hasn't been much frustration potential in git... I guess this is a good thing. > 7) In what environment do you work? Desktop machines with Linux or Windows, always using code from a central SVN repository. Really: I'm switching back and forth between Linux or Windows, and seeing git available on Windows just as well makes this fun again. > 8) What other hobbies do you have? Programming. Oh, and programming. Well, there's also family: A wonderful wife and two cute daughters. > 9) What is your favourite movie? Schulze gets the Blues. > 10) What are your visions for Git? (I.e. where do you want it to go?) Git will empower the user! (Well, here the user is more the developer, but this doesn't rhyme as good.) The GUI tools will make it possible for everyone to use git instead of any of the previously popular central VCSs, but now with the decentralized features on top. This is step one in introducing a true decentralized model into the normal company workflows. Step two is to start using push and pull between the decentralized repositories, so that developers use the tools to represent their actual workflow. Step three: World domination! GPL only needs to be acknowledged ================================= It is funny how licenses can make people speak up who normally would keep quiet, and so we got a complaint that we forced the users of our Git installer to accept the GNU Public License. Personally, I think it is not nice to demand changes, especially license changes, or changes in the visibility of the license, when you get the software for free. Also, I try to stay on the very safe side of legal issues, in order to avoid contact with lawyers, especially ones where they demand that I cross their hands with silver. So I was quite unwilling to change that. However, none less than our benevolent dictator, Linus Torvalds spoke up, pointing out that it is not really a _choice_. You need not accept the GPL, it is sufficient that you acknowledge that this is the only license regulating your rights with regard to Git. Now, that was very reasonable, so we changed it. Personal sidenote: I would do quite a few things for people whose work I benefit from every day; it is that fundamental idea of fairness (or tit for tat) encoded in the GPL which makes me extremely comfortable with that license, and I think that I am not the only one. The installer was on diet ========================= The installer had a diet on Doctor's orders, but no worry, it is not bulimic. As stated previously, now even 'git svn' was added. How was that possible? Pretty easy. We dragged around a lot of garbage in our installer. Some time ago, it was janitized, and lost a few megabytes already, but this time, even more effort was put into removing unneeded parts. Mainly inside the Perl library, files were removed. Since the Git installer is not meant to be any development environment -- we do not even ship gcc -- shipping header files and linkable libraries does not make sense. Neither is documentation for Perl needed, since nobody is supposed to develop the Perl scripts of Git without the development environment: that is what 'msysGit' is for. So away went the documentation! A few files have been removed from Tcl, vim, some unneeded Perl modules, and cvs, too, so we actually ended up with an 8.0 megabyte installer _with_ 'git svn', whereas the previous installer weighed in with 8.8 megabyte. core.autocrlf = true ==================== We finally addressed issue 21. For Windows projects, it seems to be the safest bet to just set core.autocrlf = true. We did that in the /etc/gitconfig we ship with msysGit. There is a subtle problem here, and we will see how to solve it: Git's source code itself is not supposed to be checked out with core.autocrlf = true. For new cloners, this should be easy to address (even if it has not been done yet): Git is checked out by /etc/profile, and we can set the config variable there, too. However, existing users who pull (and do not read the msysGit mailing list regularly enough to have heard about the problem) will have to update their setup manually. Update to a new ssh, problems with pulling msysGit ================================================== There have been reports about hanging ssh processes, and for a long time, we had no idea how to solve it. Until it was reported that an update to a newer MSys helps. So we updated some of MSys' libraries, and ssh.exe. Little did we know what this would involve: one peculiarity of the Windows platform that has never been addressed properly by Git is that you cannot overwrite files that are in use. The symptoms in Git are that you check out, or merge, new revisions, but the files-in-use are not updated, and marked as dirty afterwards. ... such as the MSys libraries, when you are using the bash. While pulling msysGit, for example. Now, a workaround is to actually install Git from our installer, then cd to the msysGit root, and perform the pull. That is a bit involved, though. A few ideas arose, such as writing a script, or using git-gui. But a script does not seem feasible, as it would not be able to close the bash, perform the pull, and then start the bash again. Also, "git merge" is still a shell script, so even git-gui (which runs via Tcl/Tk, and thusly does not use the MSys libraries) cannot perform the merge -- except when you call the git-gui from the Git installer. We'll see if we can find an elegant way to tackle that problem. Entering Babel: "rebase" ======================== What is a "rebase"? For Git users, it means replaying commits on top of a new branch point. Not so in Windows Speak: Windows' .dll files have fixed address ranges assigned to them, and when they overlap, problems occur. The tool "rebase" is meant to help there, by assigining non-overlapping ranges to existing .dll files. Peter Harris -- about whose work you will likely read more in the next Heralds -- was so kind to diagnose and fix that problem, by running "rebase" himself. Unfortunately, this tool is a closed source tool. But happily, Peter could point me to an Open Source implementation of it, and I succeeded in compiling it. As a consequence, we have now a script to fetch, compile and install that Open Source "rebase" tool in our "full" branch, for the joy and enlightenement of interested developers. git-cheetah is now a submodule ============================== We readded the necessary COM infrastructure, and added git-cheetah (the hopefully-soon lookalike of TortoiseCVS for Git) as a submodule in /src/git-cheetah. It is not checked out by default, so you will have to update the submodule as usual: $ cd / $ git submodule init src/git-cheetah $ git submodule update src/git-cheetah $ cd src/git-cheetah $ make Speaking of git-cheetah: mailing list member Kirill is working pretty hard to get a context sensitive menu in place, and on separating the platform dependent parts out into their own source files. So my dream about a git-cheetah for Dolphin, Konqueror and Finder has actually a chance to become reality soon! -- To unsubscribe from this list: 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
