Re: Gate between git and mediawiki : remote-helpers

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: May 22, 2011, 19:31 UTC
Message-ID: <7vfwo6y1kg.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <BANLkTim+2Mv7bnfsNVAsn80MUx8-fjYZow@mail.gmail.com>

Arnaud Lacurie <arnaud.lacurie@gmail.com> writes:

Show 12 quoted lines

> This mail referred to that previous one :
> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/173991
>
> 2011/5/22 Claire Fousse <claire.fousse@gmail.com>:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'm a member of the team trying to establish a gate between mediawiki
>> powered wiki and git.
>>
>> We've tried several things which seems to work. However, it is
>> something like git-svn and would require some commands such as git-mw
>> to work. Is it recommended to use remote-helpers instead of that ?

I am not Matthew, but my gut feeling is that it largely depends on what you are interacting with, and how you envision the result to be used in a larger MediaWiki ecosystem.

In the case of SVN interoperability, there is an established community that exchanges their work via:

	svn checkout svn://some.where.xz/project
        svn update
	svn commit

and although people on the git side can already participate with:

	git svn init svn://some.where.xz/project
        git svn rebase
        git svn dcommit

it is understandable that they wish to be able to say:

	git clone svn://some.where.xz/project
        git pull -s rebase
        git push

to make it feel more similar to the native git experience. Now, even if there may be no "svn checkout/update/commit" equivalents in the workflow of established MediaWiki users, it may be nice to be able to work with:

	git clone --vcs=mediawiki http://some.where.xz/wiki/
        git pull
        git push

>> There is one problem though : nobody wants to git clone the whole
>> Wikipedia for instance.

Then don't let them in your initial version. I do not see any problem in that. People can gain experience with smaller projects, like so:

	git clone --vcs=mediawiki https://git.wiki.kernel.org/
        git pull
        git push

When we need narrow (in the tree dimention) or shallow (in the history dimention) in either native or foreign transports, somebody would eventually add proper support. Currently we do not do "narrow" even for native transport (I have one cooking privately but it is progressing only slowly, and I think there may be others who are interested in it).

I would suggest not to be worried too much about narrow/shallow in your initial round.