Re: Simple commit mechanism for non-technical users

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Aug 19, 2009, 10:20 UTC
Message-ID: <20090819102036.GC28920@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.1.00.0908190940430.5594@intel-tinevez-2-302>

On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 09:49:50AM +0200, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

Show 16 quoted lines

> Then you have a bunch of people who do not want to care about learning 
> proper version control.
> 
> This is what I would do: write a very simple .cgi (I'd use Perl for that), 
> which has a file upload button, takes the name as commit message (or maybe 
> adds a field where you can type in a commit message, but that might be 
> asking your bunch of Aunt Tillies too much), strips the "v3"-like suffixes 
> ($name =~ s/[-_ ]*v\d+(\.[A-Za-z0-9]{1,5})$/$1/;), set author and 
> committer information according to IP (and refuse if the IP is not in the 
> internal mapping) and commit.
> 
> The whole script would probably not be larger than 50 lines, and require 
> Git to be installed on the server.
> 
> The bigger problem is that your Aunt Tillies most likely would not love 
> gitweb, so you need a fancier interface.

Actually, I think there is a technical problem here. You get Aunt Tillie's v3, but you don't necessarily know what it is based on. So if some other Aunt Tillie has submitted a v3 in the meantime, what do you do with her file? Commit on top? Try to guess where her v2 was, branch from there, and merge?

If you commit on top, then you are potentially erasing the other person's work. If you do a merge, you are likely to get conflicts (especially because Aunt Tillie likes to use horrible binary formats) that _somebody_ will have to resolve.

I guess you can throw each Tillie on their own branch and then let somebody clueful do the merging, but then you do not really have people working together.

I think this is a fundamental issue. Most version control systems (and especially distributed ones) are about doing concurrent work and merging, and merging requires a bit of a clue. The Aunt Tillies of the world really need a locking system to manage concurrency.

-Peff