{"thread":{"id":"21381","subject":"[msysGit Herald] The 11th revision of the msysGit Herald","startedAt":"2009-10-27T15:06:12Z","lastAt":"2009-10-27T15:06:12Z","messageCount":1,"participants":["Johannes Schindelin"],"isPatch":false,"patchVersion":null,"patchTotal":null},"messages":[{"id":"126025","messageId":"alpine.DEB.1.00.0910271605270.11562@felix-maschine","threadId":"21381","inReplyTo":null,"subject":"[msysGit Herald] The 11th revision of the msysGit Herald","fromName":"Johannes Schindelin","fromEmail":"johannes.schindelin@gmx.de","sentAt":"2009-10-27T15:06:12Z","receivedAt":"2009-10-27T15:06:12Z","isPatch":false,"sender":{"key":"johannes.schindelin@gmx.de","avatar":"https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/127790?v=4"},"body":"Good morning Git land!\n\nA busy and frantic Tuesday afternoon is as good an occasion as any to \noffer to you the 11th revision of the msysGit Herald, the quite \nirregular news letter to keep you informed about msysGit, the effort \nto bring one of the most powerful Source Code Management systems to \nthe Operating System known as Windows. \n\nThese are the covered topics:\n\n\tSome trivia\n\n\tGit Cheetah goes platform independent!\n\n\tInterview with Sebastian Schuberth\n\n\n\nThis issue is more to distract myself from my ever-growing day-job \nobligations than to inform about breakthrough developments in Git for \nWindows; Actually, it is a good sign that there are no major new \nthings, as this means that Git on Windows is finally where we wanted \nit to be: stable. \n\n\nSome trivia\n===========\n\nWhenever I am too overworked to do something sensible, but too bored \nto go to sleep, too, I do utterly senseless stuff like factoring 1453 \n(have fun!), reading xkcd, or looking at Google Analytics. \n\nThis time, it was the latter, and I looked at the top ten countries \naccessing our website: \n\n * USA 2904\n * Germany 987\n * China 809\n * UK 580\n * Japan 489\n * Russia 438\n * France 379\n * Canada 341\n * Brazil 248 \n * Poland 229 \n\n(Total: 11.115) \n\nCompare this with the first week of msysGit: \n\n * USA 90\n * UK 57\n * Norway 35\n * Germany 24\n * Sweden 23\n * Italy 8\n * Hungary 8\n * Japan 6\n * Netherlands 5 \n * France 5 \n\n(Total: 298) \n\nSo we have come a long way. It is striking how the top ten are divided \nbetween the rich countries, with the exception of China. So, Windows \nis a rich man's Operating System. Big news. You got to be rich to go \nfor a coffee whenever you load a text document. \n\nThe trend that the website is accessed mostly during the working week \nis even more prominent now than it was in the beginning. Just compare \nthe last week: \n\n * Monday 1453 (the same prime number as in xkcd 247... coincidence?)\n * Tuesday 1676\n * Wednesday 1667\n * Thursday 1628\n * Friday 1591\n * Saturday 933 \n * Sunday 918 \n\nto the 3rd week after msysGit was born (the first two and a half weeks \nof msysGit were a little chaotic, so they are not representative): \n\n * Monday 98\n * Tuesday 54\n * Wednesday 46\n * Thursday 39\n * Friday 39 (wait, the same as Thursday? Again... coincidence?)\n * Saturday 13 \n * Sunday 33 \n\nSo the trend is definitely that the weekdays are almost equal, with \ndrop offs on Monday (drinking coffee to get out of the weekend?) and \nFriday (leaving maybe an hour early, or at least not doing anything \nduring that hour?), but the weekends are barely over the half of the \nweekday baseline, which makes me wonder what the Windows users do on \nweekends. Use Linux, maybe? \n\nA little under a half accessed more than 1 page, which I found quite \nencouraging, but then, to get at the downloads, you have to click a \nsecond time. Assuming that some people do not find the direct download \nbutton, and taking into account that 86% access 3 pages or less, that \nmeans that only 14% are interested enough in more information to \nactually access other information. \n\nIt is fascinating that only 90.76% actually surf to our website using \nWindows, and a full 5.08% is Linux (MacOSX: 3.72%). Of course, in \ntheory you could pretend, but then, I do not expect the average \nWindows user to know that this is even possible. \n\nAnother interesting tidbit is that while Google helped most of the \nvisitors find our webpage in the beginning, now it is only 35.81%, and \na full 21.36% come via git-scm.com instead. \n\nIt struck me as odd that the search terms \"tortoisegit\" and \"tortoise \ngit\" were responsible for 7.71% of our traffic, when I thought that I \nmade quite clear what I think of the TortoiseGit effort. \n\n\nGit Cheetah goes platform independent!\n======================================\n\nRecently, Heiko Voigt got interested in improving Git Cheetah, and to \ncatch my attention worked on making the architecture \nplatform-independent. \n\nHe caught my attention, indeed, and Git Cheetah now works not only in \nthe Microsoft Explorer, but also in MacOSX' Finder (for the moment, \nonly up to Leopard; help for getting it to work on Snow Leopard is \nvery much appreciated) and in GNOME's Nautilus (which should cover at \nleast the American half of Linux users). \n\nGreat stuff. \n\n\nInterview with Sebastian Schuberth\n==================================\n\nRecently I attended the GitTogether in Berlin, and for the first time \nhad a chance to see the faces behind some email addresses, including \nSebastian's. He is most known in the msysGit project for his huge \neffort to make a commercial-grade installer for Git for Windows. \n\nSomehow I managed during those years (msysGit is already 2.5 years old \n-- time flies like an arrow) to miss the fact that I did not honor \nSebastian by interviewing him for the Herald yet. Let's undo that \nmistake. \n\n> 1) How did you get involved with Git? \n\nIt all started when the management of the company I used to work for \nfinally saw reason to move away from CVS. I was annoyed by CVS long \nbefore that, but my tries to get people to use SVN instead failed \nmiserably, although I already had all the conversion done, mostly due \nto the management failing to see CVS' issues and being unwilling to \nspend resources on the migration, and some stubborn CVS command line \njunkies that did not want to learn new commands ;-) That was in \nOctober 2006. \n\nBut as our SCM requirements got more demanding due to an increasing \nnumber of offices and cooperation partners at different sites, it \nbecame clear a DVCS would be beneficial. Steffen, who's involved in \nthe msysGit project, too, was the contact person at one of our \ncooperation partners at that time. In the second half of 2007, IIRC, \nhe evaluated Mercurial and Git, Git coming out as the winner. Not \nquestioning his preference too much (as we were happy some one took \nthe time to do a thorough test of both systems) and trusting Steffen's \nexpertise, we agreed on giving Git a try. \n\n> 2) What were the reasons that you started working on Git? \n\nBeing mainly a Windows developer, it quickly turned out that there was \nno nice Windows support in Git back then. There was Cygwin's Git, but \nit had several issues, and conflicted with our company policy to \ninstall Cygwin with text mode mounts. Digging a little further, I came \nacross msysGit which was more what I wanted. At that time, msysGit was \npackaged a 7-Zip SFX, lacking the usual settings like creating \nshortcuts and uninstall capabilities which a Windows user would \nprobably expect. This is when I started to work on an Inno Setup based \ninstaller that also creates hard-links on NTFS drives instead of \nmaking copies for the various Git commands etc. I just wanted to \npolish things a little bit in order to avoid colleagues who were not \nso fond of switching away from CVS from finding a reason to complain \nalready when launching the Git installer ;-) Meanwhile, the installer \nhas gained a lot of features and I think it does a good job at \nconfiguring the most basic Git settings in a nice and easy way, and it \nhas paid off to replace the 7-Zip SFX installer. \n\n> 3) What do you like most in Git? \n\nAs Git also was my first DVCS, I like several things about Git that \nare common across many DVCS. I find stashing changes, squashing \ncommits and rebasing branches to be particularly useful features. \nMoreover, I like the simple fact that there's only one .git directory \nat the top of your working tree, and not in every sub-directory. Also, \nthe reflog can be very handy if you messed something up :-) Using \nhashes instead of version / revision numbers also is a very practical \nthing. And I really adore Git for its speed on Linux (not on Windows, \nthough, but I believe that's not Git's fault; it rather rather seems \nto be a general issue of how NTFS performs for a large number of small \nfiles). \n\n> 4) What do you hate most in Git? \n\nHmm, hard to say. Instead of a single big issue that I would hate, \nthere are some smaller issues that annoy me. For example, I still \nthink the documentation is too technical and uses too much \nGit-specific vocabulary instead of using more common expressions. When \nworking on Windows, I dislike that msysGit, as the name suggests, \ndepends on MSYS and on tools from the Unix world. I believe all \nprograms in the Git distribution should become binaries compiled for a \nspecific platform, and not rely on shell interpreters or third-party \nlanguages like Tcl/Tk. \n\n> 5) What was the most surprising moment when working with Git? \n\nThat big merges basically just work! It's so much less work doing \nmerges with Git than with CVS, as Git just does the right thing, \nusually :-) \n\n> 6) What was the most frustrating moment when working with Git? \n\nWell, this is not so much about working *with* Git, but rather working \n*on* Git: I really cannot understand how submitting patches for \nupstream Git is still done via e-mail. We all know the benefits of \nGit, so we should make use of them! For example in the form of a mob \nbranch like msysGit does. I've heard arguments before, like that it's \neasier to comment on patches inline if they're contained in an e-mail, \nbut all that does not outweigh the advantages like getting rid of the \nvarious formatting / white-space issues that occur regularly and the \ntime overhead for applying the patch to the correct branch. \n\n> 7) In what environment do you work? \n\nI work in a dual-boot environment with Windows Vista and Ubuntu 9.04. \nI recently upgraded my PC to an Intel Core i7 920 with 6 GB of RAM and \na decent NVIDIA graphics board, as I do a lot of (GP)GPU stuff, mostly \nusing OpenGL and CUDA / OpenCL. \n\n> 8) What other hobbies do you have? \n\nBesides involvement in other OSS projects and working on my own \nprivate programming projects, I also did and do several martial arts \nand ride the motorcycle. \n\n> 9) What is your favourite movie? \n\nThat depends on the genre, but currently one of my all-time favorites \nis \"Kung Fu Hustle\" :-) \n\n> 10) What are your visions for Git? (I.e. where do you want it to \ngo?) \n\nI'd really like to see Git becoming a first-choice for pure Windows \ndevelopers, too, not only e.g. for people that need to make a project \nthat already uses Git and works on Unix compile on Windows. And as \nmuch as I like the diversity of e.g. Git GUI tools, which is in the \nnature of every OSS project, I think for the sake of clarity for the \nusers and to combine features and developing efforts, several projects \nshould merge. For example, I doubt that we need something in the order \nof five different Git Windows Explorer shell extensions. \n"}]}