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« GNOME 2.26 is here | Next GNOME Foundation Elections »

Thursday 19 March 2009

GNOME & git

Lucas sent the announcement earlier today: the GNOME project will move to git.

This announcement highlights the recent steps that lead to this decision: the DVCS survery and the analysis of its results. Of course, all this was discussed on mailing lists (okay, it quickly went from discussion to flamewar ;-)). It was not a decision that was taken after onl a few thoughts, and I guess it's good to remind people that using a DVCS is something that was in people's mind since quite some time. For example:

gvfs development was first done in git, back in 2006.
people suggested to have git as an option back when we were doing the subversion migration, and this was discussed in various places since then.
we had a git mirror since last year (alongside the previously created bzr mirror).
it's also worth pointing out that the GTK+ team considered git in the past, or that NetworkManager moved away from the GNOME infrastructure specifically to use git while other projects like empathy are using git via git-svn since quite some time.

Note that I mainly put git-related things in the above list; I'm pretty sure you can find some bzr/hg/etc. items that would also show the community interest in a DVCS. It turns out the chosen DVCS was git and it's simply because the majority in our community prefers git. Some people might wonder why we're not letting developers choose another version control system if they prefer another one; the answer to this is easy: to keep our infrastructure maintainable, we choose to only have one version control system. It doesn't mean other systems are bad. Really.

We decided to make the migration happen in one month, after 2.26.1. The original idea was to make the switch after 2.26.0, but we wanted to give some more time for people to double-check the great work that the git transition team has done. Furthermore, the month between .0 and .1 releases generally sees quite some activity to fix bugs filed after the .0 release and for translations, so it made sense to wait for 2.26.1 to be out before breaking the habits of quite a few people ;-)

[15:17] | [GNOME] | [#508]

Comments

1. Juri Pakaste [19/03/2009@16:36]

Excellent. I'm a bzr user myself and would have preferred it (but didn't vote, I felt that if I haven't committed anything in years, more active people should be the ones making decision), but the important thing is that a decision was made and something else can be the focus of discussions for the next couple of years.

2. Buh Bye [19/03/2009@16:40]

Thanks, but no thanks. I just don't have the time or the interest to learn yet another vcs, so my eight-year involvement with GNOME ends here.

3. ulrik [19/03/2009@16:41]

Awesome, this makes it much easier to contribute! (At least for me)

4. Vincent [19/03/2009@17:01]

@Buh Bye: I'm sad to hear that. It's certainly not without pain to switch to another vcs, but on the other hand, you can use git in the most basic way quite easily. The doc for translators that was written is a good example.

5. Vadim P. [19/03/2009@17:08]

Good stuff (better than svn), though I'm glad not to be a contributor already, nor would I consider being one in light of this.

(or attempt to get any gtk+ gnome-hig compliant projects as gnome ones really. forced buzgilla & git ftl.)

6. anon [19/03/2009@17:37]

Good stuff ;). Not bzr, but better than svn.

To bad those who wanted to provide a git gateway over bzr was treated so badly. It's quit easy, the git protocol is bascily the disk format.

7. Holger [19/03/2009@19:23]

That is great news! The use of a distributed versioning system (be it git or whatever) is very handy especially for external contributors.

8. sb [19/03/2009@19:51]

This is great news. And anon, now those guys can provide a bzr gateway over git. Good thing it's so easy!

9. Uzytkownik [19/03/2009@19:57]

Great. I prefere git over bzr but I prefere DVCS over subversion (I'd not mind bzr).

10. Stef Walter [19/03/2009@23:32]

Nice summary. I started learning git and using git-svn with gnome-keyring once that seemed to be the consensus. It's been worthwhile to lean git.

11. Christian Reis [20/03/2009@00:39]

We're just finishing the git import infrastructure in Launchpad; once that's done you will be able to use bzr to work with git-hosted branches just like in the good ole days! There should be an announcement posted to http://blog.launchpad.net/ in the next weeks.

12. Uno [20/03/2009@05:11]

It's sad to see people leave (like the comment #2) but maybe it's a good thing that Git is no longer a "yet another VCS" to learn. It's _the_ DVCS of open-source world -- outside the Ubuntu/Launchpad community at least. Any developer and contributor need to know Git anyway.

13. Jeff Schroeder [20/03/2009@05:51]

@Uno: My thought is that #2 was just another troll on the internet. This is great news for gnome! Thanks for leading the charge even if it was a hard choice guys.

14. Stoffe [20/03/2009@10:14]

So much for "GNOME is people". Obviously, the project only wants elite super hackers and no normal people - or even non-programmers - to contribute. No artists, no documenters, no translators, no nothing.

Only vulcans, as Joel polsky put it: "Lacking a program manager, your garden-variety super-smart programmer is going to come up with a completely baffling user interface that makes perfect sense IF YOU’RE A VULCAN (cf. git). The best programmers are notoriously brilliant, and have some trouble imagining what it must be like not to be able to memorize 16 one-letter command line arguments. These programmers then have a tendency to get attached to their first ideas, especially when they’ve already written the code." Source: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items...

Spot on, for anybody who isn't a vulcan or has invested copious amounts of time learning git and thinks they all are as hard to use and don't want to switch.

It's a sad day for the rest of us, but good to know how the GNOME elitists feel about the rest of us.

15. Stephen [20/03/2009@10:29]

Excellent - I think this is very overdue, and Git is certainly a great choice. I'm a bit surprised at comment #2 though. Being able to adapt to new ways of doing things is an essential skill for a good software developer. So I hope you're just a troll...

As for #14 - you have got to be joking... If you take five minutes looking at a Git manual, you can see it's just as easy as SVN, but far, far more powerful and flexible. git pull, git add file. git commit. git push. Not that hard at all, really... You can even make it easier by not using the add command and just using a 'git commit -a'.

16. Vadim P. [20/03/2009@13:32]

@Stephen: if you take 5 mins to look at the git manual, you'll see references to 'refs', 'objects', and nevermind that you cannot tell a single commit apart, because, in a very human-friendly way, it is encoded in a sha1 hash! (and tagging every commit with a sensible number just defeats the initial point of using it. I also don't know when a certain commit will be referenced, so just saying "tag the important ones" does not help.)

Your argument can apply to a pure CLI interface just as well:
"Not that hard at all, really... If you know what you're doing, already read the manual and know the hundreds of commands needed to operate it (because intuition here will not work)."

... so no, being forced to use tools which aren't made with time considerations in mind isn't a skill; it is an unnesessary waste of time. The simpler it can get a job done, the better, I couldn't care less what it does behind the scenes as long as it does it well (and git is trying to do its best to stuff it's background activity into the manuals).

17. Stephen [20/03/2009@14:02]

I think you're blowing things a bit out of proportion, Vladim. Take a look at this manual: http://git-scm.com/course/svn.html - you can use Git exactly the same way as you use Subversion - the main difference being that a few commands have different names. 'Git for the Lazy' is also a very good and straightforward guide: http://spheredev.org/wiki/Git_for_t...

And if that is too hard, there are many graphical Git tools anyway, like Giggle. You can just select some files and then hit the commit button with them...

18. Petr Tomasek [21/03/2009@20:31]

OK, I contributed patch here or there to Gnome, I don't like the git, so no more wasting time on GNOME, sorry...

19. xB [22/03/2009@06:47]

I always loved git, 1. because its decentral and 2. because its so quick and efficient. Now I was just recently getting into gnome. So this just one more reason to learn gnome better. Thank you. :-)

Btw. I really hope people are right and there are going to be some GUI tools to make working with git easier. I definitely can not understand all those people that say git is easy to use. It took me really quite some time to learn it.

20. Gerard Braad [23/03/2009@18:57]

People who are used to Subversion van still use the git-svn feature: http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/... You will miss out on all the extras that git provides, but it does allow you to use your familiar tools.

I definitely see adopting git as an advantage to the Gnome project. This way people can more easily experiment and contribute to the project.

Thanks!

21. Vincent [29/03/2009@22:37]

Just a small note: as people can see from the comments, some people are not that happy about the switch and this was expected. That being said, not switching to a DVCS would have harmed us in the long term (a lot of core contributors really want a DVCS) and switching to another DVCS, as shown by the survey, wasn't a good option for the community.

Also, fwiw, we are working on making it easy for translators, artists and documenters to commit. We know it's important, and it's not a problem we ignore. The obvious first step is having good documentation, but people are also working on a web interface to commit translations (like transifex), for example.

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Thursday 19 March 2009

GNOME & git

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by Vincent