Re: git integration with monodevelop

From: Michael Hutchinson <m.j.hutchinson@gmail.com>
Date: Nov 12, 2008, 23:56 UTC
Message-ID: <aec34c770811121556y34465436i9ffb5e29dbf203a7@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <491AAE6D.8030304@op5.se>

On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 5:22 AM, Andreas Ericsson <ae@op5.se> wrote:

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> Recently, I've started learning C#. More for fun than anything else,
> but one of the mono core devs sniffed me out and said they've been
> thinking of porting jgit to C# to get a working IDE integration in
> monodevelop. Currently, the only option available (with IDE
> integration anyways) to the poor C# devs is either Microsoft's
> crappy VSS, or the less crappy but still far from fantastic
> Subversion.

I'm glad you're interested :-)

We do have an interface in MD for integrating VCS providers, and although the only existing one is SVN, I believe some users are working on bzr and perforce addins. I'd prefer to see git get established as the default (D)VCS ...

Currently, to implement a VCS provider one needs to subclass VersionControlSystem, as demonstrated by the SVN provider: http://anonsvn.mono-project.com/viewvc/trunk/monodevelop/main/src/addins/VersionControl/MonoDevelop.VersionControl.Subversion/MonoDevelop.VersionControl.Subversion.addin.xml?view=markup. We may need to extend the interfaces in order to expose more DVCS-specific features, but I think it's best to find and fix these as needed rather than speculatively implementing things.

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> So in an effort to learn C#, I've decided to play along with this
> (hopefully with some help from the MonoDevelop team), but it seems
> to me that the best place to start is the fledgling libgit2 and link
> that with git-sharp. The primary reason for this is ofcourse that I
> think it'd be a terrible waste to have yet another from-scratch
> implementation of git in a new language (ruby, java, C#, C...). The
> secondary reason is that it would be neat to have more OSS projects
> use my favourite scm.

That's actually one of the reasons we'd like a full managed implementation --it'd be trivial to include to with cross-platform Mono-based apps without worrying about architecture, C dependencies, etc. For example, Tomboy could use git to store its notes, so users would have a versioned history and better synch/merge. Then, for example, you could build a Silverlight version that would have full history in local storage.

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> Besides, getting something to rely on libgit2 early on is probably
> the best way to get more people interested in making development of
> it proceed rapidly.
>
> Thoughts anyone?

I hadn't heard of libgit2 (it looks pretty recent) but it looks interesting -- at least stable APIs would no longer be a worry. However, I think fully managed is the way to go, from the point of view of much easier dependencies (on windows, mac, silverlight and older linux distros) and licensing.

-- 
Michael Hutchinson
http://mjhutchinson.com