Feedback on native Win32 git from a Perl perspective

It was suggested that this link be fired through to this address.

http://use.perl.org/~Alias/journal/33825

A quick review of native Win32 git provoked by the current conversation amoungst the Perl core maintainers about changing version control systems and whether to go with svn or git (the main two candidates).

This review is utterly unrelated to whether or not central or distributed version control is better, and utterly unrelated to the features of git itself, and refer only to the native Win32 git installer/package itself.

For reference, the reviewer (me) has 10 years of experience with Perl development across both Windows, Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac (old and new).

I'm also a CPAN administrator, Perl toolchain maintainer, author of about 150 cross-platform Perl packages on the CPAN, and creator of the "Strawberry Perl" Win32 Perl distribution and win32.perl.org website.

If you have any follow up, please CC me.

Thanks

Adam Kennedy

On 7/20/07, Adam Kennedy <adam@phase-n.com> wrote:

Hi Adam,

The problem you hit is that you need the MinGW runtime -- I forget its name -- and that will have installed an item in your start menu. It's for a terminal that has all the MinGW stuff, you get a nice bash shell. I opened, added the GIT install directory to the path, and was all set.

I think Sam Vilain (aka mugwump) is going to / at / returning from OSCON this week, so he migth take a while to reply. Oh, I see he posted in your blog too.

He's been running imports of the Perl dev trees into git, they'll be at http://git.catalyst.net.nz/gitweb - fetchable via http at http://git.catalyst.net.nz/git/perl.git

My notes above are because I have _just_ been setting up git at aclient site on Win32. Took me a bit of fiddling as I hadn't used Windows in years, but I got it going...

 - needs the mingw runtime - trivial
 - runs pretty well from the commandline - impressed
 - gitk and other Tk-based utilities work great ( _very_ impressed)
but I had to fixup the wish executable name - minor
 - the http protocol wasn't supported out of the box in the version I
got, a pain for anon checkouts, and I've seen some discussion about
that on the list -- unsure here

In terms of http support -- IIRC the problem is handling of forked processes, but there might be a way to sidestep the problem. Very early versions of git did some odd curl cmdline that Cogito copied. Serialised, slow and not one bit as smart as what we do now, but we can perhaps reuse some of that.

Some things you point out can be improved once things are more polished -- like adding links to gitk and git gui but we'd need to sort out how to do this in a directory context. Heh - maybe we need one of those explorer.exe extensions...

TortoiseSVN unfortunately. But for developers used to mixed cli/gui environments, like I'm sure most Perl developers are, it'll be a breeze. It does need a bit of a howto though.

I'm guess in general terms I have a somewhat similar bg -- though I don't develop Perl ;-) -- and perhaps it's a bit of luck. I had _never_ seen MinGW (I do know CygWin) and perhaps it was a stroke of luck that it only took me about 45 minutes to get things going, figuring out the stuff noted above.

cheers,

martin

Hi Martin

The situation you are in sounds somewhat similar the one we had with our Win32 Perl distribution releases.

The main problem is that on Windows for the most part there is just no concept of "first install $something" (be that a run-time, cygwin, or whatever).

You will find, as we did, that the expectation is that there is one installer, you run it, and it does everything.

For the Vanilla/Strawberry Perl installers (http://vanillaperl.com/) the approach we ended up with to get full toolchain functionality out of the box was to bundle a copy of the MinGW packages we needed, as well as bundling a copy of dmake.

The approach ActivePerl takes is to not bundle any of these parts, and expects you to download and install dmake and a compiler seperately, and we've had a lot of praise from people with Strawberry in particular because it "just works".

You run the installer, and once it finishes the cpan client works exactly the same as it does on Unix.

I think you may end up having to take a similar approach with git.

Create a single installer that contains both the git binaries, and copies of any tools you needed embedded in them (ideally in a seperate bin directory so that they are NOT in the path, with git referring to them explicitly).

Adam K

Martin Langhoff wrote:

On 7/23/07, Adam Kennedy <adam@phase-n.com> wrote:

Agreed. And then you get in trouble if the stuff you are bundling conflicts with software tht the user has already, or installs later...

I was a longtime ActivePerl user. I remember the pain.

simple install with all included cases, and vanilla for people who want to package their own perl or get Just Perl.

Sounds like a good plan -- hopefully bundling minGW isn't too hard.

m