Re: The essential problems of moving from CVS

[Thomas Adam <thomas.adam22%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Sat, Jan 16, 2010 at 01:25:03AM +0000, David Holland wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 03:08:28PM +0900, Curt Sampson wrote:
> > For git, I'd forgotten about the lack of subtree checkouts. But that one
> > I do not believe is going to be solved technically; the idea is just
> > too incompatable with the git model.
> 
> Maybe. Mercurial has new subtree stuff out. It's pretty raw so far,
> but it's being worked on and it will probably improve.

Subtree support is coming to Git in the way of "sparse checkouts" which has
currently graduated to git.git's master branch last I read.

> For me at least it's not so much checkouts that's a problem as not
> being able to selectively update or revert subtrees, particularly in
> pkgsrc. Another related problem is that you can't really use one tree
> to hack independently on, say, sh and sail(6), because if you commit
> the changes they get mixed together and if you don't you have hassles
> updating and merging. Maybe topgit fixes this; I haven't tried it (and

Yeah -- this might be a problem, in which case you either make use of "git
stash", or believe it or not "git add", or something like topgit as you
mention.  But this then wouldn't be about subtrees using topgit, as that
just uses branches to manage different topic areas.  Note also like topgit
there are other tools, such as stgit, but that depends on python, where
topgit is just written in sh.

> And another somewhat more tangentially related problem (that topgit
> might also fix) is that you can't really keep local patches, like the
> gross hack I need for the tulip ethernet in my test machine, in the
> same tree that you use for development and commit.

Depends on your workflow.  topgit might help, but I would just make use of
branches to solve this to be honest.  If you have a specific workflow
example, mention it and I will try and give you a potential solution using
Git.

-- Thomas Adam

-- 
"It was the cruelest game I've ever played and it's played inside my head."
-- "Hush The Warmth", Gorky's Zygotic Mynci.