Re: Google Summer of Code 2007

From: Matthieu Moy <matthieu.moy@imag.fr>
Date: Feb 28, 2007, 09:03 UTC
Message-ID: <vpq4pp6r6vw.fsf@olympe.imag.fr>
In-Reply-To: <200702280842.08279.andyparkins@gmail.com>

Andy Parkins <andyparkins@gmail.com> writes:

> What about the oft-asked for windows port?  From what I've seen, none of the 
> Unix types have any incentive to do this, so a financial incentive might be 
> just the thing.

+ 1. It seems the windows port somewhat has the status "we want it but
I'm not going to do it" for most git contributors.

I'm personnally using unix 99% of the time, but I also have a piece of windows installed on my laptop. For example, I'm working on a small project using windows-only software, and being able to use git comfortably from this setup would be cool.

Also, I'm relucant to migrate to git completely even for unix-only projects, since I know that a hypothetical future windows-port will be made hard by the non-availability of the windows port.

> Given that the best thing for git in the long term is more users,

That's what I feel. The problem with distributed SCMs at the moment is that there are too many of them, not sharing enough users. For example, I had to choose a replacement for CVS with some colleagues recently. I argued about using a distributed one, but the argument against, and the decision was "SVN is what they're more likely to use later, let's go for SVN no matter how bad it is".

> and that no windows support is the commonly given reason why other
> SCMs are chosen instead, this would be a good use of the resources.

Sure. One of the best examples being Mozilla. I hardly see them using a piece of software that's not working properly on windows, since the majority of users (and probably of the developers, I don't know) are running windows.

-- 
Matthieu