Re: Windows support

Wrote this reply privately earlier; forwarding to the list at Dmitry's suggestion (though it's rendered slightly less relevant by his clarifications)...

Dmitry Kakurin wrote:

I certainly understand the conclusion, but I'm not sure I would share it. Unless you have reason to believe there's something in particular about the Windows environment that would cause git to lose data in circumstances where it wouldn't do so under UNIX-ish systems, it seems like your data should be perfectly safe.

In the year-and-a-bit I've been lurking on the git mailing list and making occasional contributions to the code, git has never lost any data for anyone to my knowledge. Its design is extremely paranoid in that regard, and the paranoia is not really anything platform-dependent. It's stuff like, never overwrite files in place (always write a new file then, once it's written successfully, get rid of the old one if needed). Or, as importantly, keep SHA1 hashes of *everything* and double-check them often. Those approaches are just as valid on Windows as on any other OS. The SHA1 hashes in particular are pretty unimpeachable, IMO; the times people have thought their git repositories have gotten corrupted, it has always turned out to be underlying filesystem or disk corruption that git's SHA1 checking has caught.

If there are data loss bugs in git (and of course it's possible, even if none have been reported to my knowledge) IMO they're vastly more likely to be generic than platform-specific.

One nice thing about git is you don't have to take its word for your data integrity. You can, without a whole lot of effort, dump out every file in the repository and verify that it is what git says it is.

Anyway, I guess my feeling would be, if I were going to choose to not use git on Windows it would be because of smoothness of the experience, lack of integration with Windows tools, difficult installation process, or stuff like that. Data integrity would not even cross my mind as a downside of git.

-Steve