[MPlayer-dev-eng] Git Checklist Was: Git migration

[Elias Gabriel Amaral da Silva]

2011/1/12 Nico Sabbi <nicola.sabbi at poste.it>:

> what's the advantage of git over svn? I don't know if and when I'll have the
> time to return coding for mplayer,
> but in case I'd like to know what death to die for:) .
> You know, I'm quite conservative regarding my development tools.

i'm an outsider here, and i don't know actually know much about svn,
but my 2 cents :P

for me the selling point of git is cheap branching. you can make a new
branch just for a single feature, and when you are done you don't even
need to keep it, you can just rebase your work to have a linear
history, and throw away the branch. (it makes it appear as you never
branched, and you can also choose to rebase into a later commit if
history advanced)

by separating each feature in a branch and doing small commits all the
time one can try another approaches easily, and work with
features/bugfixes concurrently without making history too ugly, like
interleaving unrelated commits (or getting yourself mad). and, i think
it makes easier to undo work. and all of this is very fast (thanks to
local repo)

also, git has very, very good merging tools. and it is easy. i think
that without this, branching all the time would be a nightmare :P

and, git lets one have finer grained control about which content will
be at every commit, you can even select which lines of the file you
changed will be in the next commit (in case that you did two bug
fixes, and want each one to have their same commit; you do git add
--edit, then select the exact diff that will be added in the next
commit). and if you get something wrong (a typo or something) and it
is still just at your local machine only, history doesn't need to get
uglier: you can fix commits easily (changing the last commit you
issued is specially easy, just git commit --amend)

anyway there are tons of sites about this. i liked this
http://whygitisbetterthanx.com/#svn , and i will also point to
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/871/why-is-git-better-than-subversion/531042#531042

and hmm i know you could google yourself, but,
http://techblog.floorplanner.com/2008/12/09/git-vs-svn-for-bosses/ it
can help one understand why git branches are a win (svn has branches,
but they aren't as easy, so they get less used)