[Erc-discuss] Let's switch to git for ERC development

[Michael Olson]

Arch is getting to be really behind the times, so I suggest that we
switch to using git.  I've set up commit email and #erc notifications
for it already, and have enabled Savannah's git hosting feature.  This
allows us to have a shared git repo, with the current erc projects
members all being given commit access.

I tried out all the modern Free version control systems (with the
exception of Monotone, because I didn't like its "database" idea), and
found git to be the best choice out there.  Some advantages follow:

 - Very active and interesting mailing list.
 - Way faster than Arch for every kind of operation.
 - No need to worry about databases or weird "archives" that contain
   several different projects.
 - Superior (and practical) theory for storing changesets.
 - Able to scale well.
 - Partial commits are just a matter of calling "git add" on some files,
   and then "git commit".  Or commit all the changes at once with "git
   commit -a".
 - Nifty hooks.  It was reasonably easy to set up commit email, #erc
   notification, and generation of the
   http://mwolson.org/static/dist/erc-latest tarball and zip file.
 - Recent (as of past four months) focus on improving documentation, and
   making git easy enough to use that you no longer need "cogito".
 - Comes with an import tool which was able to snarf the entire Arch
   history for erc, even across several different repositories.
   Mercurial's import tool failed when trying to access a missing
   repository, while git's tool handled this case perfectly.

I plan to update the ErcDevelopment page on the wiki with relevant
instructions by the end of this week.  In the interim, check out
<http://savannah.gnu.org/maintenance/UsingGit> (substitute "erc" for
"myproject").

-- 
       Michael Olson -- FSF Associate Member #652     |
 http://mwolson.org/ -- Jabber: mwolson_at_hcoop.net  |  /` |\ | | |
            Sysadmin -- Hobbies: Lisp, GP2X, HCoop    | |_] | \| |_|
Projects: Emacs, Muse, ERC, EMMS, ErBot, DVC, Planner |

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