[OpenWrt-Devel] SVN to GIT transition

[Jan Čermák]

Hello,

thanks for pointing that out, Steven. Yes, this is basically the main reason why
Bedrich opened this topic. If you need to maintain sustainable OpenWrt fork (no
flame please, there are some situations - like running "heavyweight" OpenWrt
fork on a device like our Turris - when it's reasonable to fork), pure Git is
the way to go.

When you have a fork based on some trunk version, it's not *that hard* to merge
upstream changes from time to time, but if you want to base your system on some
stable branch and then upgrade to a newer one, getting back the history of
changes between versions gets pretty awkward.

IMHO the main argument against Git over SVN here is that users would lose the
information that'll help them to compare which version is newer. But as Atilla
and Bruno said - git describe works maybe even better than just an incrementing
revision number. Maybe it'd be needed to change a some of the workflow, but the
pros of git (for us mainly: keeping the track of history and merging upstream
changes) outweigh the cons.

Last but not least - Git has become a de-facto standard for larger projects with
more contributors and the it helps to open the project to community - sending a
patch to the mailing list (a patch that sometimes just lies there without any
positive nor negative response for weeks) might discourage smaller contributors.
Just look at the situation of openwrt-packages - the people became much more
active since moving the repo to GitHub.

Regards,
Jan

On 10.10.2015 15:21, Steven Barth wrote:
> One important point was IIRC, migrating from one stable branch to another is awkward
> since the history is different, so rebasing custom changes on top is painful.
> 
> All in all there was relatively overwhelming feedback of most of the people at the
> summit that there lifes would be very much easier if the main repo was based on git
> and there was noone who really felt the opposite.
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