[Python-Dev] Looking for VCS usage scenarios (original) (raw)

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Tue Nov 4 02:59:00 CET 2008

Jesse Noller writes:

I don't see how git can be considered given poor windows support - compilation on OS/X can be a bear too.

I can't speak to the "poor Windows support", but I've been compiling both in MacPorts (pretty much every MacPorts release, which is like weekly) and from the kernel.org repo (intermittently, 1-3 months apart) on Mac OS X since git 0.99 and the only trouble is with the documentation (and the never-ending stream of bugs in port and/or the Portfile, of course). I doubt this is a problem on Mac OS X any more, if it ever was.

Also the ability to completely nuke the local-work-copies commit history ("cleaning it up") worries me, but I'm also paranoid.

bzr and hg both offer a similar feature. They just make it less convenient and possibly more dangerous to use (because the operation that cleans up history also destroys it, where in git cleaning up history creates garbage). People who dislike merge turds will use it and there is nothing you can really do about that.

git is at least as safe in this respect as any other dVCS, because it allows you to get the unwanted history out of your face, but it then becomes garbage remains in the repository until you actually do a git-gc --prune. It's easy to collect dangling heads and check whether you need them. Again, some people will throw them away, but there's nothing you can do about that. You don't have to throw away your own history, though.

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