[ruby-core:21039] Happy new year and... moving Ruby development to Git?

[evolving_jerk]

Happy new year everyone.
A question to Matz and all the Ruby contributors: are there any real  
reasons to use Subversion and not Git for Ruby development?

I don't want to turn this into "centralized VCSs suck, distributed  
VCSs rock" kind of discussion, but seriously: many large open source  
projects moved to DVCS in last year or two (as large as OpenJDK,  
OpenSolaris, MySQL, Zope, Firefox, Perl 5), and some of them (Ruby on  
Rails is the most obvious example) have seen dramatically increased  
number of contributions from the outside of the "core team", because  
with DVCS, experimentation of all sorts is so much easier. Others that  
did not are considering a move and in process of evaluation of  
different options: FreeBSD and (again, I may be totally wrong) Emacs  
(leaning towards Bazaar?).

A number of well known projects in the Ruby space use Git now: from  
Rails and Merb to RSpec to DataMapper to Rubinius to even Rake I  
believe (I may be wrong here). RubySpec uses Git, by the way.

Recently series of patches by Brent Roman reminded me again how  
different the process of evaluating of different forks/experiments/
patches with Subversion is. Yeah, download 7 files, apply them in  
order, with diff-mode in Emacs helps. I mean, it is not *really* hard  
but it wasn't a no brainer either. Pulling from a person who came up  
with something I may be interested in using Git (and GitHub obviously)  
is so much easier, that you start feeling the difference once you get  
used to DVCS process.

Of course, there is git-svn and hg-svn and bzr-svn of all sorts, and  
they all work fine, but people seems to use what official repository  
uses. Probably because they don't want to bother converting their  
patches, or maybe because converters like git-svn look fragile to  
them, it does not matter much.

What do you think? Is there a way for community to help with this  
transition, if you decide it makes sense?

MK

[James Gray-7]

On Jan 1, 2009, at 6:42 AM, Michael Klishin wrote:

> A question to Matz and all the Ruby contributors: are there any real  
> reasons to use Subversion and not Git for Ruby development?

Subversion is nice for the central repository and the wider support.  
I think that makes it the ideal pick for Ruby's main repository.

Luckily, that doesn't hinder us git fans.  You can just pull the  
central git repository down with git-svn (which ships with git) and  
you get all the advantages of git locally.

It's the best of both worlds.

James Edward Gray II

[brabuhr]

On Thu, Jan 1, 2009 at 11:22 AM, James Gray <james@...> wrote:

> On Jan 1, 2009, at 6:42 AM, Michael Klishin wrote:
>
>> A question to Matz and all the Ruby contributors: are there any real
>> reasons to use Subversion and not Git for Ruby development?
>
> Subversion is nice for the central repository and the wider support.  I
> think that makes it the ideal pick for Ruby's main repository.
>
> Luckily, that doesn't hinder us git fans.  You can just pull the central git
> repository down with git-svn (which ships with git) and you get all the
> advantages of git locally.
>
> It's the best of both worlds.

I wonder if there would be in the Ruby community any interest in
setting up an "official git mirror" of the subversion repository on
GitHub.  (Similar to the official mirror of Perl:
http://github.com/blog/276-perl-mirror-on-github.
)  Thus anyone who takes an interest in playing with the ruby source
has a well-known point to fork from.  Considering the ease of directly
using git-svn straight from the source, I do somewhat the usefulness
of the suggestion.

But, it may be useful in the case that multiple GitHub users
independently use git-svn; now there may be some confusion on the part
of "casual hackers": 'Hmm... which one of these 7 ruby repositories
(returned in a GitHub search) is the best/most reliable/most
trust-worthy/etc.'

[Federico Builes]

brabuhr@... writes:
 > I wonder if there would be in the Ruby community any interest in
 > setting up an "official git mirror" of the subversion repository on
 > GitHub.

Vladimir Sizikov set up a MRI repository for the Rubyspec project at
http://github.com/rubyspec/matzruby/. It contains branches for all the
current branches in the SVN repository so don't be afraid if you see it empty.

 > 'Hmm... which one of these 7 ruby repositories
 > (returned in a GitHub search) is the best/most reliable/most
 > trust-worthy/etc.'

We've been using it for 5-6 months now with no issues, so take a look and let
us know if you find it useful.

--
Federico

[Hongli Lai-2]

brabuhr@... wrote:

> I wonder if there would be in the Ruby community any interest in
> setting up an "official git mirror" of the subversion repository on
> GitHub.  (Similar to the official mirror of Perl:
> http://github.com/blog/276-perl-mirror-on-github.
> )  Thus anyone who takes an interest in playing with the ruby source
> has a well-known point to fork from.  Considering the ease of directly
> using git-svn straight from the source, I do somewhat the usefulness
> of the suggestion.
>
> But, it may be useful in the case that multiple GitHub users
> independently use git-svn; now there may be some confusion on the part
> of "casual hackers": 'Hmm... which one of these 7 ruby repositories
> (returned in a GitHub search) is the best/most reliable/most
> trust-worthy/etc.'

We have a read-only Git mirror set up at git://git.phusion.nl/ruby.git
This mirror is updated automatically 3 times a day.

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

Quoting Michael Klishin <michael.s.klishin@...>:

> Happy new year everyone.
> A question to Matz and all the Ruby contributors: are there any real
> reasons to use Subversion and not Git for Ruby development?
>
> I don't want to turn this into "centralized VCSs suck, distributed VCSs
> rock" kind of discussion, but seriously: many large open source
> projects moved to DVCS in last year or two (as large as OpenJDK,
> OpenSolaris, MySQL, Zope, Firefox, Perl 5), and some of them (Ruby on
> Rails is the most obvious example) have seen dramatically increased
> number of contributions from the outside of the "core team", because
> with DVCS, experimentation of all sorts is so much easier. Others that
> did not are considering a move and in process of evaluation of
> different options: FreeBSD and (again, I may be totally wrong) Emacs
> (leaning towards Bazaar?).
>
> A number of well known projects in the Ruby space use Git now: from
> Rails and Merb to RSpec to DataMapper to Rubinius to even Rake I
> believe (I may be wrong here). RubySpec uses Git, by the way.
>
> Recently series of patches by Brent Roman reminded me again how
> different the process of evaluating of different
> forks/experiments/patches with Subversion is. Yeah, download 7 files,
> apply them in order, with diff-mode in Emacs helps. I mean, it is not
> *really* hard but it wasn't a no brainer either. Pulling from a person
> who came up with something I may be interested in using Git (and GitHub
> obviously) is so much easier, that you start feeling the difference
> once you get used to DVCS process.
>
> Of course, there is git-svn and hg-svn and bzr-svn of all sorts, and
> they all work fine, but people seems to use what official repository
> uses. Probably because they don't want to bother converting their
> patches, or maybe because converters like git-svn look fragile to them,
> it does not matter much.
>
> What do you think? Is there a way for community to help with this
> transition, if you decide it makes sense?
>
> MK

I'm really not an expert on revision control systems, but just off the  
top of my head it seems like there are just too many of them, and  
there's bound to be some kind of "market shakeout", leaving a "Big  
Three". Right now, I'd guess that those three would be Subversion, Git  
and one other. I really don't know whether CVS will survive -- there  
are still quite a few projects using it, but I can't actually name  
one. And I don't know if Mercurial, Darcs, and Bzr have enough  
momentum to be worth thinking about.

My experiences with Git for my own small projects have been, shall we  
say, less than satisfactory after about six months, compared with  
about two years of Subversion and about ten years using ClearCase at  
my day job. But that's just a learning curve issue, I think. Clearly  
to be an open-source hacker, one *must* be Git-savvy, and all of my  
new projects are going to Github.

One other question for the community, though -- is there room for  
*another* version control system specific to the Ruby community,  
tailored to our unique needs?

--
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P), WOM

I've never met a happy clam. In fact, most of them were pretty steamed.

[evolving_jerk]

On 01.01.2009, at 20:50, brabuhr@... wrote:

> Similar to the official mirror of Perl:
> http://github.com/blog/276-perl-mirror-on-github.
>


JFYI, Perl 5.x has moved to Git in last December:
http://use.perl.org/articles/08/12/22/0830205.shtml

MK

[evolving_jerk]

On 01.01.2009, at 21:00, Federico Builes wrote:

> Vladimir Sizikov set up a MRI repository for the Rubyspec project at
> http://github.com/rubyspec/matzruby/. It contains branches for all the
> current branches in the SVN repository so don't be afraid if you see  
> it empty.


And it's great and useful. The question is, if a lot of people in the  
community do use Git extensively already, and at least with Rails and  
Merb it proven itself being worth the switch because aspiring  
contributors *do* find it easier to contribute, what really holds Ruby  
core team from making this move? I just want to understand.

At least in the part of the Ruby community that works on web stuff, it  
is way easier to find a person who uses and likes Git than a person  
who does not.
And I am pretty confident doing such a bold statement. What I  
personally found out is, if someone pokes you with a question like  
"hey did you see this library X that popped up recently?" you are  
likely not going to be wrong, if you search it on the GitHub first,  
not google.

I cannot think of an interesting project in the Ruby space that  
appeared in 2008 and does not use Git. Either I have a sick metric of  
whether project is interesting (it sure may be so), or Git already  
reigns supreme in the Ruby universe, and I am sure there is a reason  
to it, and MRI development can benefit from the switch.

MK

[evolving_jerk]

On 02.01.2009, at 1:36, Michael Klishin wrote:

> I cannot think of an interesting project in the Ruby space that  
> appeared in 2008 and does not use Git.


Ok, other than Ryan Davis' RubyParser and Flay, but I believe Ryan  
uses Perforce for all his projects anyway. I just don't want it sound  
like "Flay and RubyParser are not interesting" ;)

MK

[evolving_jerk]

On 01.01.2009, at 19:22, James Gray wrote:

> You can just pull the central git repository down with git-svn  
> (which ships with git) and you get all the advantages of git locally.


True, but I still think there is a barrier about "what is official".  
The alternative I can see is to have a Subversion mirror of git  
repository's long living branches. What about this? Still best of both  
worlds, but I am sure it will faster the experimentation Dave Thomas  
has been talking about at RubyConf 2008.

MK

[Jim Weirich-2]

On Jan 1, 2009, at 7:42 AM, Michael Klishin wrote:

> A number of well known projects in the Ruby space use Git now: from  
> Rails and Merb to RSpec to DataMapper to Rubinius to even Rake I  
> believe (I may be wrong here). RubySpec uses Git, by the way.


Rake switched to git during the Ruby Hoedown (while I was sitting  
about 5 seats down from defunkt).  I have seen the number of  
contributions to Rake skyrocket after the switch.

And using git makes the evaluation of those third party contributions  
much easier to check out.  You create a branch and pull in the patches  
(which is really easy if the patches come form another git repo).  If  
they look good, that temp branch gets merged with the main.  If I  
don't like something with the patch, I just delete the branch and all  
is good.

It was an uncomfortable two weeks while I got used to the "git  
way" (which is quite different from the "svn way").  But once past the  
initial learning curve, I'm very happy to be using git and would  
choose git over svn for any new project where given the choice.

--
-- Jim Weirich
-- jim.weirich@...

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

Quoting Michael Klishin <michael.s.klishin@...>:

> And it's great and useful. The question is, if a lot of people in the
> community do use Git extensively already, and at least with Rails and
> Merb it proven itself being worth the switch because aspiring
> contributors *do* find it easier to contribute, what really holds Ruby
> core team from making this move? I just want to understand.

You'd have to ask them that. Given the sheer number of Ruby core  
developers working on MRI and KRI in Subversion at the moment, I think  
there would need to be a *compelling* reason to switch.

> I cannot think of an interesting project in the Ruby space that
> appeared in 2008 and does not use Git. Either I have a sick metric of
> whether project is interesting (it sure may be so), or Git already
> reigns supreme in the Ruby universe, and I am sure there is a reason to
> it, and MRI development can benefit from the switch.

Well, all of my *new* projects are being done in Git (and on Github!),  
but I'm not sure it's worth the effort to migrate the ones in  
Subversion on RubyForge. But the main reason I switched is that my  
projects tend to so much non-Ruby stuff (R, Perl, PostgreSQL,  
LyX/LaTeX, bash, and Linux itself) that I don't really consider myself  
a "Ruby developer" in a very pure sense. And I wanted to learn Git.  
And Github is built on / by EngineYard. And Git was invented by Linus  
Torvalds. :)

--
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P), WOM

I've never met a happy clam. In fact, most of them were pretty steamed.

[Federico Builes]

Michael Klishin writes:
 >
 > On 01.01.2009, at 21:00, Federico Builes wrote:
 >
 > > Vladimir Sizikov set up a MRI repository for the Rubyspec project at
 > > http://github.com/rubyspec/matzruby/. It contains branches for all the
 > > current branches in the SVN repository so don't be afraid if you see  
 > > it empty.
 >
 > And it's great and useful. The question is, if a lot of people in the  
 > community do use Git extensively already, and at least with Rails and  
 > Merb it proven itself being worth the switch because aspiring  
 > contributors *do* find it easier to contribute, what really holds Ruby  
 > core team from making this move? I just want to understand.

Just for the record, I totally agree with you on this. I think that the
"open" nature of Git gives people the impression that they can experiment and
that a repository is there for you to play, to play, to improve, not to read
the code and keep it as a sacred vault.

With regards to the centralized nature of Subversion (I think James Gray
brought it up), remember we can have a central copy (the original repository)
who'd be controlled by the current ruby-core and then people can start
forking from there and we'd have all the benefits of both SVN and Git.

--
Federico

[Yukihiro Matsumoto]

Hi,

In message "Re: [ruby-core:21053] Re: Happy new year and... moving Ruby development to Git?"
    on Fri, 2 Jan 2009 08:49:49 +0900, znmeb@... writes:

|You'd have to ask them that. Given the sheer number of Ruby core  
|developers working on MRI and KRI in Subversion at the moment, I think  
|there would need to be a *compelling* reason to switch.

We already set up quite a few tools around Subversion, so we need to
port them to support git.  Yugui (who uses git herself) is in charge
of the issue.  You can contact (and offer help to) her.

                                                        matz.

[Florian Gilcher]

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Hash: SHA1


On Jan 2, 2009, at 2:32 PM, Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote:

> Hi,
>
> We already set up quite a few tools around Subversion, so we need to
> port them to support git.  Yugui (who uses git herself) is in charge
> of the issue.  You can contact (and offer help to) her.
>
> matz.
>

In addition to that, I want to mention that Windows support of GIT is
still sub-standard. I'm using the cygwin-build on a daily basis[1] and  
can
speak out of personal experience.
Configuring everything beyond the most simple things gets arcane and  
hard.
If "ease of use" is the argument, it doesn't hold true on win.

In the light of this, I would suggest an "official" mirror.

Regards,
Florian Gilcher

[1]: Yes, I also tried the msysgit, which is even worse.
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[Luis Lavena]

On Fri, Jan 2, 2009 at 12:18 PM, Florian Gilcher <flo@...> wrote:

> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
>
> On Jan 2, 2009, at 2:32 PM, Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> We already set up quite a few tools around Subversion, so we need to
>> port them to support git.  Yugui (who uses git herself) is in charge
>> of the issue.  You can contact (and offer help to) her.
>>
>>                                                        matz.
>>
>
> In addition to that, I want to mention that Windows support of GIT is
> still sub-standard. I'm using the cygwin-build on a daily basis[1] and can
> speak out of personal experience.
> Configuring everything beyond the most simple things gets arcane and hard.
> If "ease of use" is the argument, it doesn't hold true on win.
>
> In the light of this, I would suggest an "official" mirror.
>

I would disagree on that topic.

I use on a daily basis msysGit (1.5.5 and 1.6.0) without issues. Uses
notepad as editor or bundled vim too.

Also, for the record, configured to use ssh and plink (PuTTY) and both
work without issues.

One important thing: disable autocrlf (false) since is the worse
default msysGit developers could have introduced.

We can fork this discussion to ruby-talk if you need help. I use it
for several open source projects and my compnay projects too without
issues (and sharing the environment with Mac and Linux users).

As for the Ruby on Git official support will be really really helpful.
More if GitHub is used as official mirror or hosting, since they are
building around it a lot of tools that ease contribution (namely: fork
queue).

> Regards,
> Florian Gilcher
>
> [1]: Yes, I also tried the msysgit, which is even worse.

Again: which part is worse? It lacks things like git-serve, but I can
live without the need to "host" git repositories in my own computer.

--
Luis Lavena
AREA 17
-
Perfection in design is achieved not when there is nothing more to add,
but rather when there is nothing more to take away.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

My opinion:

Git is currently the flavor of the month. It's getting adopted for reasons which amount to fashion rather than legitimate technical merit. It has a horrible user interface, and a fundamentally broken model.

[ http://blogs.gnome.org/newren/2007/12/08/limbo-why-users-are-more-error-prone-with-git-than-other-vcses/ ]

I use bazaar, which has all the decentralized goodness of git, but with an easy UI and proper multi-platform support. Plus, it doesn't need anything special running on the server, so I can host a repository anywhere.


mathew

[Austin Ziegler]

On Fri, Jan 2, 2009 at 2:55 PM, mathew <meta@...> wrote:

> My opinion:
>
> Git is currently the flavor of the month. It's getting adopted for reasons
> which amount to fashion rather than legitimate technical merit. It has a
> horrible user interface, and a fundamentally broken model.
>
> [
> http://blogs.gnome.org/newren/2007/12/08/limbo-why-users-are-more-error-prone-with-git-than-other-vcses/
> ]
>
> I use bazaar, which has all the decentralized goodness of git, but with an
> easy UI and proper multi-platform support. Plus, it doesn't need anything
> special running on the server, so I can host a repository anywhere.

I'm playing with both git and hg for some side projects; so far, I'm
preferring hg.

-austin
--
Austin Ziegler * halostatue@... * http://www.halostatue.ca/
               * austin@... * http://www.halostatue.ca/feed/
               * austin@...

[Charles Oliver Nutter-2]

mathew wrote:
> My opinion:
>
> Git is currently the flavor of the month. It's getting adopted for
> reasons which amount to fashion rather than legitimate technical merit.
> It has a horrible user interface, and a fundamentally broken model.

I'm not as negative about git, since for my limited scm-fu hg and git
are just svn with a local repo, but I definitely agree with the "flavor"
statement. Between minor versions git has changed command-line options,
added and removed commands, and introduced bugs. Don't get me wrong, I
like it, but I don't like it enough to go through the pain of moving an
existing large project to it without a very good reason. Add to that
what Matz said about wider tool support and it's really not compelling.

JRuby will probably be making a move to Mercurial soon, and our reason
for doing so is that we're moving to the JRuby-on-Rails-based kenai.com
project-hosting site Sun built over the past couple years. If we're
moving there, we'll need to migrate SCM anyway, so we might as well
migrate to DSCM. Hg is the current likely candidate simply because it's
well supported by kenai and by the tools we use (namely, NetBeans).

An official up-to-the-hour git mirror would probably be the nicest way
to support git for ruby-core right now, and I think github even supports
git-svn clones in a smart way now. I run off a copy of Vladimir's
git-svn mirror myself, and I use git-svn for JRuby work, so that would
be my recommendation, at least until git support is rock solid and
relatively consistent across all the usual platforms and tools.

- Charlie

[Eustáquio Rangel-2]

My two cents:

On Fri, Jan 2, 2009 at 5:55 PM, mathew <meta@...> wrote:
> Git is currently the flavor of the month. It's getting adopted for reasons
> which amount to fashion rather than legitimate technical merit. It has a
> horrible user interface, and a fundamentally broken model.

I'm a CVS user who was not seduced enough to migrate my projects to
Subversion, but now I'm migrating to Git, because I really liked its
features. I cannot agree with you about the technical merits, user
interface etc, but agree with the "fashion" thing.
Please forget the "Rails loves Git neons" for a moment, remember that
Git is used to keep projects like the Linux kernel and take a look
again on it. I think it would be cool (ops) to have the Ruby source
code on a git repository.

Regards,