Re: [lwip-devel] Versioning System

[David Empson]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Bill Auerbach" <address@hidden>
To: "'lwip-devel'" <address@hidden>
Sent: Thursday, June 09, 2011 7:55 AM
Subject: Re: [lwip-devel] Versioning System


> >As noone seems to have objections, can we proceed? I found a howto to
> > convert from CVS to git, but as I'm not a project leader, I can't do the
> > work, I think.
>
> I'm not a developer and feel there's no point in objecting, but I will add
> that as someone who updates weekly or so and keeps running the latest CVS
> HEAD in my development, git will be less convenient for me as we do use 
> CVS
> in house.  I will have to install git and learn the basics, which might 
> not
> be much, but it's still something to do as it's not part of my daily
> toolset.

I'm also not a developer, and will live with whichever system is picked. The 
following is mainly to provoke discussion about potential issues, hopefully 
without getting into turf wars over which VCS is better.

Some background about my experience: at work we've been using proprietary 
Windows-only version control software (Code Co-op, which is a distributed 
VCS). I'm familiar with the concepts involved in something like git or 
mercurial, but I haven't used either of them. I have some experience with 
Subversion. My only use of CVS has been to access HEAD for LWIP, and I do 
that via Mac OS X (which comes with cvs command line tools) rather than 
running CVS on Windows.

I did some quick research on git and mercurial to get an overview of them. 
My main concern with git is that it appears to have poor support for 
Windows - need to install cygwin or similar, limited GUI tools (probably 
worse than for CVS), and possibly no integration with the standard Windows 
source code control architecture which is used by a lot of applications to 
integrate with version control software. It sounds like mercurial has better 
Windows support, at least as far as GUI tools are concerned (but I don't 
know whether it integrates with the Windows SCC mechanism).

I expect that a fairly high proportion of LWIP users are running Windows as 
their development platform. Since LWIP users have limited exposure to the 
VCS (mostly just fetching HEAD), limited Windows support in git may be less 
of an issue.

The question really should be what suits the developers. How many of the 
developers are running on Windows, and of them, how many have used either 
git or mercurial on Windows?

If my concerns about git on Windows are unfounded then it is probably best 
to go with whichever system is more familiar to the active developers.