[development] A Git mirror for Drupal CVS

[Wim Leers]

On Feb 22, 2008, at 14:27 , Karoly Negyesi wrote:
> However great git is, given the huge number of our contributors  
> using Windows and on various levels of knowledge about RCS systems,  
> anything without a proper Windows port and a Tortoise-alike  
> interface has no chance. To my knowledge, current this means  
> Mercurial: 2007-12-02: First public release (0.0.1) of TortoiseHg  
> with binary installer. Since then there were three more releases --  
> quite an active project. There is a http://repo.or.cz/w/git-cheetah.git/ 
>  which says "This is an explorer extension in its infancy. Do not  
> expect anything to work, unless you are fixing it." -- unless this  
> becomes useable, git is out of question.
>
> ...
>
> Do we want to change? I presume that the project-VCS API integration  
> happens eventually so drupal.org is ready (this is quite a stretch).  
> Well, after many years I am not so sure. Are the niceties of SVN  
> over CVS are enough to make such a big change? What this buys us?  
> Will the hard concepts of branching and tagging become easier for  
> our contrib authors? I doubt.


At first, I found using CVS a hurdle. I managed, but I had to look up  
several of the commands every time. Until I discovered the usage  
of .bash_profile. Now I absolutely don't mind using CVS, since all  
ugly things are abstracted away (although several of these commands  
are Drupal-specific, but that doesn't matter to me, as I use SVN  
everywhere else).

My point is: the biggest problem people have with CVS, is the  
usability aspect (actually the concepts, but it's usability  
improvements that should make the core concepts obvious). However,  
that can be overcome by using your shell effectively – any coder  
should know how to use a RCS and the shell. But that doesn't solve the  
other problem: themers generally don't know how to use a RCS in the  
first place.
Changing to a different RCS won't fix any of these problems, at least  
not to the level where we need it.

So I think a good candidate "solution" ("improvement" would be more  
accurate), would be to code our own CVS front-end, tied specifically  
to Drupal purposes. If written in C++/Qt, it would be possible to  
provide a cross-platform interface. Cross-platform is important to us:  
we want to support both Windows and Mac OS X (and perhaps more). This  
would probably be used by many coders too, not just themers.
Does anybody think this is a good idea? Or perhaps it could not work?  
If so, for which reasons?

So I fully agree with you, Karoly, changing the RCS won't fix any of  
the *real* issues we're currently having :)

Wim Leers  ~  http://wimleers.com/work
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