On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 5:38 PM, Michael FIG <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> "Krzysztof Kowalczyk" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
>> On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 3:37 PM, Michael FIG <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>> once Ian figures out the best way to host user contributions):
>>
>> Move the repository to github.com?
>
> Does git actually clone the entire repository on checkout?  If not, I
> would be hesitant to put something like COLA into a proprietary web
> application that may change its policies or availability without
> notice.  And have a 100MB limit.

It's a fair point about github.com being proprietary. As Steve said,
every checkout has the full history of repo, since checkin 0, so there
is no real lock-in as long as there is at lest one copy somewhere.
There are also tools to mirror git repos between svn, both ways and
you can trivially backup git repo by running "git pull" periodically
via cron job.

There are also free services like repo.or.cz and software that powers
repo.or.cz is open-sourced so you can setup repo with the same web
interface as repo.or.cz on your own server, just like you can setup
svn server.

Personally I trust github.com to survive longer than repo.or.cz,
precisely because it charges for premium service, so they can
subsidize large amount of freeloaders. I use github rather than
repo.or.cz because I found repo.or.cz slow(er) and I have a paid
account with github because I prefer to pay them few bucks a month
that manage my own server and I like their web ui.

As to size, the good think about git is that a repo containing full
history of checkins is not much bigger that subversion checkout of
just one version, thanks to more efficient storage method. Here are
the sizes on my hard-drive of current idst checkout:

Subversion, only current revision:
kjkmacpro:src kkowalczyk$ du -sh fonc
 79M    fonc

Git import via git-svn, full history, not optimized:
kjkmacpro:src kkowalczyk$ du -sh fonc-git
117M    fonc-git

Git import via git-svn, full histor, optimized via git-gc:
kjkmacpro:src kkowalczyk$ du -sh fonc-git
 98M    fonc-git

Anyway, I mention github.com because it really solves the problem that
I've encountered frequently with projects using centralized repository
with untrusting and/or unresponsive maintainers (which is virtually
all of them): making small contributions requires jumping through so
many hoops that it's just not worth it to e.g. submit a
msvc-compatibility patch (something I can usually do even without
being expert on the software). And contributors of small things often
turn into contributors of bigger things, so those projects loose not
only small things but also bigger things.

This is the problem you tried to solve by starting your own mercurial repo.

I just prefer git because it has clearly won dvcs wars (and mercurial,
bazaar, monotone, darcs lost) and since I already had to invest in
learning git, I would prefer not to learn those other systems.

I also like github.com because just using git (or mercurial or bazaar)
is only part of the problem. You can use git as badly as svn. The
other part is making forks trivial and forked branches visible to
others. github lists forked repos in a nice timeline view which gives
forks more equal footing and does all that without any additional
burden on the maintainer of the orginal/official repo.

-- kjk

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