[development] Git best practices for client codebases

[Sam Boyer]

I tend to advocate full clone. You're talking about a task that version
control is designed for. Now that we've made the switch, IMO native
code:Git::bytecode:another VCS, or worse, patch stacks, etc. I don't
know what drush did before to "make this easy" - maybe pop off patch
stacks, update the module, then re-apply the patches? Fact is, though,
nothing Drush could have done under CVS can compare to patching with
native Git commits: your patches can speak the same language as upstream
changes, and you have all of Git's merge & rebase behavior at your
fingertips to reconcile them.

There are some occasional exceptions to this, but I really do think it's
a bit daft not to keep the full history. Keeping that history means
peace of mind that your patches (now commits) can be intelligently
merged with all changes ever made to that module for all time, across
new versions, across Drupal major versions...blah blah blah. Trading a
few hundred MB of disk space for that is MORE than worth it.

cheers
s

On 2/28/11 10:56 AM, Marco Carbone wrote:
> Since a Git clone downloads the entire Drupal repository, the Drupal
> codebase is no longer so lightweight (~50MB) if you are using Git,
> especially as if you clone contrib module repositories as well.
> 
> With CVS, our usual practice with clients was to checkout core and
> contrib using CVS, so that we can easily monitor any patches that have
> been applied, so that they wouldn't be lost when updating to newer
> releases.  (Drush makes this particularly easy.) This is doable with Git
> as well, but now there seems to be the added cost of having to download
> the full repository. This is great when doing core/contrib development,
> but not really necessary for client work. This is unavoidable as far as
> I can tell, but I don't think I'm satisfied with the "just use a tarball
> and don't hack core/contrib" solution, especially when patches come into
> play.
> 
> Is there something I'm missing/not understanding here, or does one just
> have to accept the price of a bigger codebase when using Git to manage
> core/contrib code? Or is managing core/contrib code this way passe now
> that updates can be done through the UI?
> 
> -marco////


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