[Gnash-dev] we're finally gitting along...

[Rob Savoye]

I've turned on GIT support for Gnash, in addition to the existing CVS,
and imported the entire Gnash source repository into GIT. (which took
many hours on a fast machine) It turns out I can play with GIT locally
to get the hang of it, without "pushing" this git repository upstream to
savannah. It also turns out I can keep this experimental GIT repository
in sync with CVS, so whenever we do decide to push this upstream, it'll
be fine at that time. I figure I'll play with it for a few weeks to get
the hang of it, then I can help the other Gnash developers with the new
command set. I'm working up a simple cheat sheet, plus there are many
"git for cvs users" tutorials and cheat sheets out there already.

I'm finding I like GIT already. :-) One big thing is GIT supports
branches in an intelligent manner, unlike CVS. GIT makes it pretty easy
to create branches, switch between them, delete them, etc... This
encourages one to develop on a branch and then merge to the mainline,
rather than the CVS style of always working on the mainline the majority
of the time and often only branching for a release. I'm also looking
forward to being able to rename files and directories.

Anyway, I'm going to try to live in GIT for a while, then I'll let
everyone know when we'll switch over completely. If you want to play
with GIT yourself, here's the easy way to get started. Checkout a fresh
tree from CVS someplace, cd into it, and run "git cvsimport -C gnash-git
gnash". Then check on it hours later as it populates the tree with all
the change history. Once done, you can use "git-gui" to help with GIT,
or "gitk", for browsing the history. If you update the top level CVS
tree used to create the git repository, rerunning git-import after a cvs
update will freshen the files in the git repository so you can stay in sync.

        - rob -