[Tfug] Version Control

[Yan]

> Can these files be R/O and still use the repository?  Or, are they
> used to track the dynamic state of the repository?  I.e., could
> you copy the hierarchy onto a read-only medium and still *use* it?
> (with the ASSURANCE that the repository's integrity is physically
> "uncompromisable"?)


I've never tried this, personally. I would *guess* that if you had the repo
on an r/o medium, you would be able to do stuff like look at the logs and
diffs and so forth, but you wouldn't be able to commit files (even if the
files themselves were r/w). That's just a guess, though.

So, how do "other (non-git) tools" determine the state of the repository
> and the files that it governs?  Or, is *all* of that information exposed
> via formal git(1) interfaces (the output of which is *stable* enough
> that I could parse it without worrying that the next version of git will
> alter those reports in some way that would break my scripts)?
>

Honestly, I don't really know the answer. I'd imagine that the tools go
right into the internals at least sometimes. I was thinking more in the
sense that the end-user making modifications (like the diffing issue)
shouldn't be parsing the git metadata themselves.

Would you trust Linus to not change his mind regarding the VCS
> *he* wants to embrace?  When you've got an army of UNPAID droids
> doing your bidding, its pretty easy to rationalize your decisions.
> OTOH, if he was CEO of Linus, Inc and was *paying* all those
> developers, how keen would he be on porting their repository to
> some other tool -- given that he'd have to justify to stockholders
> the expense for doing same?
>

While Linus wrote git, and the Linux kernel was the first high-profile
project to use git, git has hit critical mass in its own right since then.
Linus' hypothetical decision to leave git would hurt it, but I don't think
it'd hurt it in a major way. In either case, the appropriate analogous
situation (to a Perforce buyout) would be a company buying out the git
project itself which, as we've seen with Oracle OpenOffice and Oracle
MySQL, open source projects tend to survive these things by forking away.

But, that ties up a lot of hardware.


At the risk of opening a can of worms: this is what VMs are for :-)

- Yan
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