Re: The essential problems of moving from CVS

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

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.

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
haven't used git all that much at all) but it's fairly new and
Mercurial's similar tools, which have I think been around longer,
aren't really fully baked yet.

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.

If you have suggestions for the above I'd like to hear them, although
maybe this part should be taken back to the list.

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