Re: Deciding between Git/Mercurial

From: Erik Faye-Lund <kusmabite@googlemail.com>
Date: Sep 27, 2009, 19:34 UTC
Message-ID: <40aa078e0909271234l227e9d27i71fcdc788a78c850@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <h9odqq$ig9$1@ger.gmane.org>

On Sun, Sep 27, 2009 at 9:18 PM, Anteru <newsgroups@catchall.shelter13.net> wrote:

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> Don't get me wrong with Git+msysgit on Windows, the point is simply if
> we switch to git, can we expect that Windows will be supported for the
> foreseeable future or is it possible that git may simply drop Windows
> support completely? For Mercurial, this is a non-issue, as it is written
> in Python, and Python will support both Windows and Linux.

The chance of Windows support being dropped from git is very unlikely
- there's way too many people depending on git for Windows already for
that to happen. Besides, git is open source, so you can always fix
Windows issues yourself.

As for Mercurial, Python programs aren't automatically portable to Windows either. But I expect that they have the same very close to zero chance of having Windows support dropped as git has.

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> As I said, I'm happy with using msysgit, but I cannot find any roadmap
> etc. which helps me to determine how git and Windows is going to
> continue (for instance, I can find some complaints that git's
> performance is bad on Windows due to cygwin's fork()/exec(), is this
> likely to get ever "fixed"? I guess git# will solve this as soon as it's
> ready?)

Git (neither mainline nor msysgit) doesn't have any official roadmap as far as I know. People just hack away on what they feel is important. If you want to make sure something gets done, chip in the development-time yourself.

As for the fork()-performance, this is only an issue for some tools (if any at all - I don't think this issue exists in msysgit). In my experience, git on Windows is faster than any other VCS I've ever used on Windows.

-- 
Erik "kusma" Faye-Lund
kusmabite@gmail.com
(+47) 986 59 656