[Project-managers] Git and github

[Tobias Achterberg]

Just my 2 cents:

In my view, git is very much superior to svn, mostly because of its ability to 
work with branches and to do offline development. This is particularly true for 
projects that have multiple developers. Yes, it is different and switching from 
svn to git will cost you two or three weeks of rewiring your brain, but it is 
definitely worth it.

Using svn-git mirroring will most likely severely cripple many of the git 
benefits. There is (as far as I know) just no way of mapping git branch/merge 
histories to svn, and one would always need to rebase (i.e., linearize) the git 
history before one can apply it to svn. Pretty painful.

So, my suggestion would be to switch completely to git. We did this a few years 
ago with CPLEX and everybody there feels that this was a very good move as it 
dramatically improved the way code development and version control is used.
After I joined Gurobi, switching from svn to git was basically the first thing 
that we did, and again people start to like it. In both cases switching and 
learning to master git was not that painful.

But if you want to keep svn for whatever reason, I guess you should then stay 
with it and not try to get into the git world on some crippled mirroring path.


Cheers,

Tobias


On 05/13/14 16:51, Ted Ralphs wrote:
> Dear project managers,
>
> Recently, there have been a number of requests to support git an an alternative
> to subversion and, in particular, to allow projects to be hosted and managed on
> github. As such, I have established a github organization for COIN-OR
>
> https://github.com/coin-or
>
> and we are currently hosting a few projects there as a test. We have been
> discussing this on the TLC and the board and our current thought is that all
> projects would continue to have a presence on TRAC and would probably have their
> repos mirrored onto COIN (this is easy with git). We now have the capability of
> hosting projects with git on the COIN server using TRAC, i.e., you can add a git
> repo and browse the source just as you can with subversion.
>
> For a number of reasons, it would probably be good for COIN to have a bigger
> presence on github---this is the current GOTO host for open source projects
> these days and it has a lot of nice features. However, I realize not everyone
> wants to switch to git. We are considering setting up two-way mirroring between
> subversion and git using a package called subgit that seems to do a pretty good
> job of this. There are some interesting challenges in doing the
> mapping---philosphically, git and subversion are very different--but it does a
> pretty good job of it.
>
> So, the questions are:
>
> 1. How many of you would be interested in switching to managing your project
> with git if you had the chance?
>
> 2. Would you object to the mirroring of your project to github for any reason?
>
> I'd appreciate your feedback when you get the chance. It will be difficult to
> make this work without support from project managers.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Ted
> --
> Dr. Ted Ralphs
> Associate Professor, Lehigh University
> (610) 628-1280
> ted 'at' lehigh 'dot' edu
> coral.ie.lehigh.edu/~ted <http://coral.ie.lehigh.edu/~ted>
>
>
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