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A proposed Subversion vision and roadmap

A proposed Subversion vision and roadmap

Posted Apr 4, 2010 20:57 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: A proposed Subversion vision and roadmap by fperrin
Parent article: A proposed Subversion vision and roadmap

GNOME's switch to git was a disaster? Sorry, I hadn't noticed. I was too
busy celebrating the convenience of being able to version-control my local
changes.

(And, honestly, which subdir of which GNOME app do you want to check out?
I can't think of many that are further decomposable. gnome-games,
maybe...)


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A proposed Subversion vision and roadmap

Posted Apr 4, 2010 22:14 UTC (Sun) by fperrin (guest, #61941) [Link]

Not being a GNOME contributor, I must say that I got only one side of the story, that is, fpeter's one.

The conversion itself was rather painful, but not because of git per se. However, a lot of translators are from countries were Internet access is quite slow ; they used to checkout only the po subdirs of applications, which they can no longer do. Since in the month before each release, translations represent about half the activity of GNOME's SVN repo, that's quite a problem for GNOME.

In addition, while looking for some references, I just found a recent example were patches are not committed because the committer doesn't have a big enough HDD to checkout the entire module. This wouldn't happen if git was able to checkout only the concerned subdir...

NB: I'm not a SVN fanatic; it's just that I want to counter the opinion of the majority in this discussion which seems to be, with a couple of exceptions, that SVN sucks and git is the alpha and the omega. git is good, SVN has flaws, and vice-versa.

A proposed Subversion vision and roadmap

Posted Apr 5, 2010 0:41 UTC (Mon) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

I read through that presentation, and it mostly makes the point that the migration wasn't easy. That's something you would expect.

For instance, why would you automatically convert the svn:ignore property to a per-directory .gitignore? You can do that (.gitignore can be on every directory, but it can be on every directory above it).

It does not really state the other points that he attempted to show.

And maybe translators just don't need to deal with the version-control system directly. If translators didn't check-out the whole application, they probably never really used it as proper version control: they never really tested their translation with the latest "SVN build". So maybe translators should switch to something like Transifex.

A proposed Subversion vision and roadmap

Posted Apr 6, 2010 16:40 UTC (Tue) by Spudd86 (guest, #51683) [Link]

"So maybe translators should switch to something like Transifex."

This seems to be exactly what they are doing. (I read planet Gnome, I vaguely recall some mentions of new tools for translators and workflow improvements for them, I don't recall clearly because I don't particularly care about translation workflows)

A proposed Subversion vision and roadmap

Posted Apr 5, 2010 0:47 UTC (Mon) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]

> This wouldn't happen if git was able to checkout only the concerned subdir...

Now it can, with the "sparse checkout" feature in 1.7.0. Combine it with a shallow clone, and you can use a lot less disk space.

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