Re: Switching from CVS to GIT

From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>
Date: Oct 16, 2007, 13:16 UTC
Message-ID: <E1IhmHM-0002hB-HR@fencepost.gnu.org>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0710161335260.25221@racer.site>

Show 11 quoted lines

> Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2007 13:39:12 +0100 (BST)
> From: Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de>
> cc: Daniel Barkalow <barkalow@iabervon.org>, raa.lkml@gmail.com, ae@op5.se, 
>     tsuna@lrde.epita.fr, git@vger.kernel.org
> 
> > As I wrote in my other message, using native APIs improves performance 
> > by at least a factor of two.
> 
> Somehow this does not appeal to my "portability is good" side.  You know, 
> if we had to do such trickeries for every platform we support, we'd soon 
> be as big as Subversion *cough*.

You have to decide whether you care about performance enough to do that or not. If you do, then introducing file I/O abstractions at higher level than the normal ``use-library-functions'' method is not such a hard problem, and doesn't make the binary larger because each platform gets only its own backend. In practice, I have found that in most cases a few well-designed and strategically placed macros is all you need.

> For me, this is the most annoying part about programming Win32.  They went 
> out of their way to make it incompatible with everything else, and as a 
> consequence it is a PITA to maintain crossplatform programs.

Portability is a two-way street. A program that wasn't designed to be portable will by definition be hard to port. To me, what's annoying is a program that was designed around a single-OS model of APIs.

Cross-platform programs are not that hard if you design them to be like that from the ground up. I'm working for a firm that does that for a living: we develop software that compiles and runs on Windows and Linux from the same source.

> Explorer often accesses files it should not lock.  
> On the machine I test msysGit on, this is the most common reason for a 
> test case to fail: it cannot delete the temporary directory, which 
> _should_ be unused.  Indeed, a second after that, it _is_ unused.

One more reason not to launch Explorer, if you ask me ;-) But maybe you have valid reasons to do that. All I can say is that I never saw such problems, but then I don't usually run programs that rewrite files in a frenzy.