Re: The essential problems of moving from CVS

[David Holland <dholland-tech%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Sat, Jan 16, 2010 at 01:32:10AM +0000, Thomas Adam wrote:
 > > 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.

Yes, the point of tools like topgit is to allow you to have lots of
branches at once without getting them mixed up. If you commit the
shell stuff on one branch and the sail stuff on another, they won't
get mixed together; on the other hand, you have suddenly subscribed to
a whole pile of administrative overhead handling the branches. Leaving
uncommitted changes in a working directory is much easier, but with
git, and at least some of the other tools as well, that method no
longer works. (Unless you make a separate clone for each thing; but
with a tree the size of NetBSD that's not very desirable.)

-- 
David A. Holland
dholland%netbsd.org@localhost