Giving Git a run-out

Something apparently snapped while I was at OSCON, and I apparently collapsed my distributed source control management quandary down to Git. I think in the end it doesn't matter all that much, since they're so similar in basic functionality, and I think I mostly got tired of sitting on the fence looking over but not being willing to commit to a specific dSCM.

Once I decided I'd go ahead with Git, my main priority was to get to the point where I could do my development on Puppet in it, which is especially important since it's the only real way for me to figure out if it will work for me, not that I really know what "work for me" means.

There are two crucial steps to testing an SCM for me: Getting Puppet's code into it, with as much history as possible, and making it available for others to have access to.

Getting the code was moderately easy, but made harder by the fact that when I first made my Subversion repository, when SVN was just starting to get popular, so I started without the typical branches/tags/trunk directory set. Here's the command I used in the end:

git svnimport -A ~/puppet-users -i -v http://reductivelabs.com/svn/puppet/ > /tmp/git.out

I tried git-svn, but it never got past revision 567 or so (which is when I switch to the popular directory structure). In addition, I was never able to actually get a working copy of the repository up to that point.

The puppet-users file contains a mapping from svn-style user names to email addresses:

luke = Luke Kanies <luke@domain.com>
lutter = David Lutterkort <dlutter@domain.com>
mpalmer = Matthew Palmer <mpalmer@domain.org>

I redirect output to a file, because it produces a bunch of output (I've got about 2800 revisions) and I don't actually care about any of it, and in addition, because I use iTerm, it takes a whole freaking cpu to scroll a terminal.

This basically worked, except that it started at revision 600 (arbitrarily close enough to the time when I changed the directory structure in the repository).

To make the repository shareable, I first just exported it via http, which was pretty easy, but then I was told I need to use git-server for performance reasons. I built a Puppet module to set it all up, and although the server doesn't work as well as I like (I really like SVN's auth file, which allows me to control who has access to the 32 repositories I maintain).

I'm getting some gritching from the Australians, and it's not like it's perfect, but at least I know I want something like that.

At the least, this has been a great experiment, and I figure we'll spend a week or so messing around with it. I'm not sure I can afford the time to experiment with all of the competitors; Matt's really pushing on darcs, but... I dunno, it seems niche, and at this point, I'm niche enough for all of us.

Tue, 07 Aug 2007 | Tags: tools, git, scm, svn, oscon, oscon07