Re: StGIT vs. guilt: What's the difference?

From: Yann Dirson <ydirson@altern.org>
Date: Jun 15, 2007, 20:01 UTC
Message-ID: <20070615200139.GS6992@nan92-1-81-57-214-146.fbx.proxad.net>
In-Reply-To: <tnx1wgds1pv.fsf@arm.com>

On Fri, Jun 15, 2007 at 03:59:24PM +0100, Catalin Marinas wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> I haven't tried quilt either but, if it uses plain text patches, the
> disadvantage might be the losing of the three-way merge when pushing a
> patch onto the stack. The solution is to remember which commit the
> patch applies to, switch the tree, apply the patch and merge with
> HEAD.

Note that I haven't tried guilt either.

However, storing diffs is certainly a great way to interact with legacy SCMs, and there are situations where guilt is certainly more suited than stgit. Eg, on a project where you have to use CVS, and you have to maintain changes to a Linux kernel, and you want to store the history of a series of patches, guilt will be much easier to use than stgit.

We may even want to implement something in stgit to ease such integration with legacy SCMs - eg. an option to auto-export the stack on push/refresh should not be too hard to implement.

> StGIT might have some more features as it is older but I see a lot of
> development is going on with guilt. Another difference is that StGIT
> is written in Python and guilt uses shell scripts (some people don't
> like the dependency on Python).

Well, people may not like python, but IMHO it is a lot easier to learn it if you don't know it (that's what I did, although I did not start from zero), than writing a robust and maintainable software of even moderate complexity in shell script. Shell script may be good for prototyping or gluing tools in a simple way, but for advanced sofware on which to rely to store my own data, it is just not really suited.

Best regards,

-- 
Yann