Re: Monotone workflow compared to Git workflow ( was RE: Git vs Monotone)

From: Sean Estabrooks <seanlkml@sympatico.ca>
Date: Jul 31, 2008, 20:57 UTC
Message-ID: <BLU0-SMTP273E4683B41DB7E44122F0AE7C0@phx.gbl>
In-Reply-To: <63BEA5E623E09F4D92233FB12A9F79430238A5EE@emailmn.mqsoftware.com>

On Thu, 31 Jul 2008 14:48:21 -0500 "Craig L. Ching" <cching@mqsoftware.com> wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> I have a question about this.  I asked this awhile back and didn't
> really get any satisfactory answers except to use git-new-workdir, which
> makes git behave a lot like monotone.  In our workflow, we do create
> branches for nearly everything, but we do find that we have a need to
> keep the build artifacts of those branches isolated from each other
> because rebuilding is expensive.  IOW, we have this sort of workflow:

Is there a problem using git-new-workdir? It sounds like it does exactly what you want.

Show 12 quoted lines

> We find ourselves constantly having to shift gears and work on other
> things in the middle of whatever it is we're currently working on.  For
> instance, in the scenario above, A might be branch that contains a
> feature going into our next release.  B might be a bugfix and takes
> priority over A, so you have to leave A as-is and start work on B.  When
> I come back to work on A, I have to rebuild A to continue working, and
> that's just too expensive for us.  So we use the monotone-like
> new-workdir which allows us to save those build artifacts.
> 
> So, that said, I ask again, am I missing something?  Is there a better
> way to do this?  How do the kernel developers do this, surely they're
> switching branches back and forth having to build in-between?

A decent build system will only compile the source files that actually changed when switching branches. Couple that with a compiler cache (such as ccache) and switching between branches in the kernel or git project usually isn't prohibitively time consuming.

Sean