[SciPy-Dev] git on windows (was: scipy.stats)

[josef.pktd at gmail.com]

On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 3:44 PM, Matthew Brett <matthew.brett at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
>>> a) are there any problems that you know of using git from the windows
>>> shell?
>>
>> None in principle here (and from what I've garnered through the discussion,
>> I am supportive of the move, as long as we don't deprecate the SVN trunk too
>> quickly), but do we have anyone, even just one person, who is already
>> reasonably facile in this regard who'd be willing to support others through
>> the transition?
>
> I would not claim to be very experienced, but I have not had any
> problems using msysgit with either the windows shell or the (rather
> good) windows power shell.    The bash shell does have problems but
> the windows shells have proved more useful.

It depends a lot on the part that I am working on. I wouldn't want to
switch statsmodels where I do my main development to git.

For scipy.stats (or bugfixes in other parts of scipy) I will give git
a try, or look at the mercurial interface, if git doesn't work out for
me.

My main problem with git was the treatment of the file system, and I
find it much easier to work with separate branches as in bzr or
mercurial. For scipy, I never had to maintain a longer lived branch
where I needed to worry about synchronizing with a changing trunk. I
prepare most changes in scipy on standalone files, because they have a
much faster development and test cycle, and merging them back into the
scipy source is usually easy.
(caveat: large/invasive changes like Ralf's docstring improvements are
a lot more difficult to handle this way, but he was finally able to
commit them himself.)

And since I never (except for two c code bugfixes in numpy random)
worked on compiled code, I didn't need a full develop-compile-test
cycle. So, any version control system is fine with me, and maybe I can
get used to the advantages of git.
As long as it is possible to stick with the basic workflow of git
without anything fancy, similar what I have seen while skimming the
nipy docs, I think it is not a problem on windows. The basic commands
and for example eclipse, GUI plugins look similar enough.

However, if/when parts of statsmodels go into scipy and I have to do
maintenance of less isolated code, then I think the Mercurial
interface might be my preferred choice.

I haven't used Mercurial much yet, but I don't see any problems with it.

So, the bottom line is, that documentation for the hg-git interface
would be very useful for Windows users (or those that think git is a
strange/unfamiliar concept.)

Josef

>
> I'd certainly be willing to help as far as I can - but I think the
> next step is to find what problems people are having (or expect to
> have) and go from there.
>
> See you,
>
> Matthew
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