Re: The Gnus repository is switching to Git as of 2010-04-19

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Wed, 21 Apr 2010 09:33:59 +0900 "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org> wrote: 

SJT> Bazaar can't handle that and won't anytime soon as a standard feature
SJT> (no support for nested trees, how to do it remains controversial among
SJT> the core Bazaar developers).  git supports that with submodules
SJT> (speaking theoretically, I haven't tried this at home), but the
SJT> subtrees represented by git submodules must have identical structure.

I don't like the way submodules work.  They are good for independent,
fairly static externals but for synchronizing two repositories I think
they'll be a pain.  There's some unpleasant caveats at
http://book.git-scm.com/5_submodules.html plus they are really easy to
screw up.

SJT> Maybe.  I worry about ghost revisions appearing when you do a git->bzr
SJT> sync, and that's where they are most likely since git users branch
SJT> with abandon then abandon the branches, while it's no fun to try to
SJT> work with Bazaar that way.  Note that ghost revisions causes nasty
SJT> bugs in bzr as recently as a few weeks ago.

Using git-bzr from http://github.com/kfish/git-bzr, it seems you can
only push to a single branch, will that still cause problems?  I think
the Gnus repository is pretty unlikely to branch with abandon, in any
case.

If Yidong, Stefan, and others are concerned about ghost revisions, we
can simply prepare the Gnus -> Emacs synchronization as a patch and
submit it through the usual channels or apply it manually ourselves in
isolation within Bazaar.  This will probably be the modus operandi at
first anyhow.

Ted