Re: Feedback on native Win32 git from a Perl perspective

From: Martin Langhoff <martin.langhoff@gmail.com>
Date: Jul 20, 2007, 13:32 UTC
Message-ID: <46a038f90707200632u1ce762c1i70eb1586e2542256@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <46A06C7F.5010601@phase-n.com>

On 7/20/07, Adam Kennedy <adam@phase-n.com> wrote:

> A quick review of native Win32 git provoked by the current conversation
> amoungst the Perl core maintainers about changing version control
> systems and whether to go with svn or git (the main two candidates).

Hi Adam,

The problem you hit is that you need the MinGW runtime -- I forget its name -- and that will have installed an item in your start menu. It's for a terminal that has all the MinGW stuff, you get a nice bash shell. I opened, added the GIT install directory to the path, and was all set.

I think Sam Vilain (aka mugwump) is going to / at / returning from OSCON this week, so he migth take a while to reply. Oh, I see he posted in your blog too.

He's been running imports of the Perl dev trees into git, they'll be at http://git.catalyst.net.nz/gitweb - fetchable via http at http://git.catalyst.net.nz/git/perl.git

My notes above are because I have _just_ been setting up git at aclient site on Win32. Took me a bit of fiddling as I hadn't used Windows in years, but I got it going...

 - needs the mingw runtime - trivial
 - runs pretty well from the commandline - impressed
 - gitk and other Tk-based utilities work great ( _very_ impressed)
but I had to fixup the wish executable name - minor
 - the http protocol wasn't supported out of the box in the version I
got, a pain for anon checkouts, and I've seen some discussion about
that on the list -- unsure here

In terms of http support -- IIRC the problem is handling of forked processes, but there might be a way to sidestep the problem. Very early versions of git did some odd curl cmdline that Cogito copied. Serialised, slow and not one bit as smart as what we do now, but we can perhaps reuse some of that.

Some things you point out can be improved once things are more polished -- like adding links to gitk and git gui but we'd need to sort out how to do this in a directory context. Heh - maybe we need one of those explorer.exe extensions...

>From a "we are very limited Windows users" POV, no, we don't have

TortoiseSVN unfortunately. But for developers used to mixed cli/gui environments, like I'm sure most Perl developers are, it'll be a breeze. It does need a bit of a howto though.

> For reference, the reviewer (me) has 10 years of experience with Perl
> development across both Windows, Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac (old and new).

I'm guess in general terms I have a somewhat similar bg -- though I don't develop Perl ;-) -- and perhaps it's a bit of luck. I had _never_ seen MinGW (I do know CygWin) and perhaps it was a stroke of luck that it only took me about 45 minutes to get things going, figuring out the stuff noted above.

cheers,

martin