[Ardour-Dev] Speeding up scons

Gabriel M. Beddingfield gabriel at teuton.org
Sun Aug 16 11:03:10 PDT 2009



On Sun, 16 Aug 2009, John Emmas wrote:
> Thanks Jörn.  Incidentally, that reminds me....  some time ago I heard that
> git was being considered as an alternative to subversion.  Is that still the

I think one of the Ardour devs has been using Git for Ardour... which is 
possible to do even if the central server is Subversion. 
(see http://ardour.org/node/2098)  This works very effectively.  I do a 
lot of development this way for Hydrogen, and the only time I need to use 
SVN is when I want to make an official branch or tag.

> case?  I read something somewhere which seemed to suggest that git wasn't
> altogether reliable at undoing changes (e.g. getting a working copy reliably
> back to a previous revision).  If that's true, it seems like a good reason
> to avoid it.  What were the perceived improvements of git over subversion?

Git by itself is rock solid.  I have never heard of any such issue.  I 
recommend it very highly.

What you have heard is possibly referring to the Git-SVN link.  This link 
is actually pretty stable... but it has a few gotchas.

The biggest gotcha is: SVN is able to store an empty directory in the 
repos, Git is not.  If you check out a SVN revision, it will create any 
empty directories that were in the SVN repos.  With Git, these empty 
directories will not be created because there is no way to represent them 
in Git.  (For pure git repositories, the convention is to put a 
'.gitignore' file in the directory so that it will hold its place).

As for Git vs SVN... there's plenty of chatter all over the internet about 
this right now... so I won't repeat any of it.  Here's some recommended 
reading:

     + Linus's talk at Google: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8

     + An SVN developer: http://blog.red-bean.com/sussman/?p=20

     + The same developer, later:  http://blog.red-bean.com/sussman/?p=90

Peace,
Gabriel


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