GCC is moving to git

https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2015-08/msg00140.html

by ingve • 11 years ago

295 133 11 years ago

gcc.gnu.org

rem7• 11 years ago

Will they keep the repo in GitHub? :)

_ea1k• 11 years ago

Probably only as a mirror.

josteink• 11 years ago

Case in point. Emacs moved from bzr to git, and they did it like that.

Official Git repo: https://savannah.gnu.org/git/?group=emacs

Unofficial github mirror repo: https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs

burke• 11 years ago

Worth pointing out though, it's far easier to keep a github mirror of a git repository up to date and correct than from other VCSes -- so even though people wanting to send GCC PRs on GitHub will be disappointed, it's still a win for discovery and searching.

davexunit2• 11 years ago

GNU projects don't use GitHub.

wyldfire• 11 years ago

As in "haven't" or are barred by FSF or other policy?

drmpeg• 11 years ago

GNU Radio is on Github. Although it's a mirror, it's up to date and devs use it for the majority of pull requests. https://github.com/gnuradio/gnuradio

agumonkey• 11 years ago

Complementary answer from r/emacs (courtesy or parent)

https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/3hsab9/could_emacs_b...

_delirium• 11 years ago

I don't think any of the "big" free-software projects do, though some do have mirrors on GitHub. The Linux kernel, the FreeBSD project, LLVM, Firefox, etc. all host their own version-control infrastructure (which makes sense to me).

code_sterling9• 11 years ago

It disturbs me that you're getting down voted. Somehow, we eschew extremism in all facets of life, but when it comes to free software, it's so expected that (even if tongue in cheek) asking a question has a reaction where someone thinks you're not contributing to the conversation.

I have more goodwill towards github than I do for RMS, with his gcc shenanigans.

vezzy-fnord8• 11 years ago

From my experience, it's the opposite. When I try to promote free software, I face backlash from people who see no ethical concerns with proprietary software, or who are apologetic to "open source" instead. Usually it's in the form of some smartass who will redefine the word "freedom" to mean something different from the context at hand, which refers to the Four Freedoms comprising the Free Software Definition.

Either way, GitHub is proprietary, so it is against GNU's principles.

yoha• 11 years ago

I feel the downvotes are actually due to the smiley.

KyleBrandt2• 11 years ago

I thought HN submissions that were many years old were supposed to have the year in the title... Oh, wait, my mistake...

KyleBrandt2• 11 years ago

Stupid comment - I apologize.

phragg• 11 years ago

Vim is moving to git, GCC is moving to git. What's with all the change?

Zikes2• 11 years ago

Google Code shutdown?

amyjess2• 11 years ago

GCC didn't use Google Code. Like all GNU projects, they're hosted on Savannah, and that's not changing.

belorn4• 11 years ago

git has more or less completly taken over the mindshare from all other version control system.

nailer• 11 years ago

I think sometimes we forget that network effects outweigh most normal values of technical superiority. Let's say, for the purposes of the argument, that "hg/Mercurial is 20% better than git".

This doesn't matter: hg/Mercurial has to be 500% better than git to be able to replace it.

Look at the past changes: they've all been huge shifts in how we do version control, not minor improvements

The DVCSs were 500% better than Subversion (wow, distributed!)

Subversion was 500% better than CVS (wow, renames work! Branching is easy! http support!)

CVS was 500% better than RCS (wow, we can check out files concurrently)

lfowles2• 11 years ago

irssi moved to git (github even) to encourage contributions.

davidgerard4• 11 years ago

LMMS http://lmms.io was on svn on Sourceforge. It was more or less moribund. Moved to git on github, immediate influx of contributors and a buggy 0.4.13 was advanced to a really very nice 1.0 in about six months :-)

Unless your project is weighty enough to have its own gravitational pull, github is a ridiculously easy place to contribute and make life easy for contributors.

kazinator9• 11 years ago

Vim is moving to git, GCC is moving to git. What's with all the change?

Git does something very well: it has great support for rewriting version histories. It nearly flawlessly supports almost every conceivable scenario of slicing, dicing, mixing and combining.

It also has great support for working at the sub-file granularity. For instance, this morning I moved a fix from an experimental branch to stable. The fix was part of a huge commit, and consisted of just a few "hunks" out of many in one file. It was obvious that the particular fix, though needed by the experimental changes, could be promoted to stable (it was a change of the kind where some code is altered in such a way that it no longer interacts with the experimental changes, and is improved at the same time.) With git I easily rewrote that big commit such that just those specific changes in the specific file were removed from that commit. This was done without touching anything in the working copy not so much as altering any modification timestamp! ("make" didn't even see that anything needed to be rebuilt after the commit rewrite.) In git we can do "keep my working copy as it is, but alter the history behind it, so those alterations then appear as staged, uncommitted changes". Then we can easily migrate the changes somewhere, like turning it into its own commit, perhaps on another branch. After I migrated those changes to master, I then went back to that branch and did a "git rebase". Lo and behold, that branch picked up the changes, and now it looks as if those changes were written on master all along, before the experimental changes were developed.

Programmers need this kind of thing because we are obsessed about making the perfect set of changes. Since the history of a code base is a digital artifact, we want to be able to hack that artifact to perfection too, not just the instantaneous/current view of the code itself.

Git is also like an adventure game in which you solve quests and acquire higher and higher status. This creates allure. The Novice Adventurer cannot understand all the reasons why the Grandmaster Wizards of GCC have switched to Git, but is mystified and fascinated.

nephyrin2• 11 years ago

Rewriting public branch history is not generally used by any major project except in extreme circumstances. This reads like an attempt at satire by someone who doesn't understand the actual utility of history rewriting in git, which is generally for extending version control to your development changes (e.g. what is more formally codified in Mercurial as the draft phase).

nhaehnle2• 11 years ago

Maybe this is a not-so-frequent thing, but I know it's not just me: As I see it, the big advantage of Git over other attempts at DVCS is that its internal model of the world is very simple and just right.

Early on when Git was still new, I read about the different types of objects (files, trees, commit objects) and how they interact, and everything just clicked. It's the correct model for version control, and I like to believe that that's why it's winning.

In fact, all your praise for Git is something that, as far as I see it, flows directly from Git having the correct model for version control.

spiralpolitik2• 11 years ago

In the case of the Gnu projects it was pointed out the futility of continuing to maintain GNU Bazaar when there were at least two more widely used DVCS (git and hg).

jahewson• 11 years ago

Bazaar is dead, it's no longer maintained and hasn't had a release in 3 years.

kazinator9• 11 years ago

So are you saying it doesn't work? What issues are you having with Bazaar that require a new release?

I couldn't care less if Git stopped making releases; what I'm using isn't the latest anyway and does everything I want. (Though I'd like any newly discovered security holes to be fixed in any pieces of Git that face the Internet; e.g. via embedding in CGIT).

hasteur2• 11 years ago

Still waiting for the obligatory RMS "Anti-Torvalds" rant. Also this doesn't seem to be the announcement of "We are moving to git as of this date" but rather "Why don't we move over to git" proposal

solidpy• 11 years ago

Git is free software, I don't see why RMS should have a problem with it. Is he still a commiter anyway?

garenp• 11 years ago

Probably because the FSF doesn't own the copyright for it. Without the copyright, you can't do fun things like forcing everyone to upgrade to the GPL3.

dbbolton• 11 years ago

He doesn't have a problem with git per se, at least not overtly. I think the confusion is that Emacs went with Bazaar over Git in 2008 essentially because it was a GNU project (and Arch had faded into obscurity by that point):

We should use Bzr because that is becoming a GNU package. GNU packages should show loyalty to each other when possible, and in this case it is possible.[1]

But now its main repository is managed with git[2], Savannah as a whole makes extensive use of git,[3] and Stallman tacitly supports git by linking to git repos from his personal website.[4]

1. http://lwn.net/Articles/272853/ 2. http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/emacs/ 3. http://savannah.gnu.org/maintenance/UsingGit/ 3. https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

jordigh3• 11 years ago

RMS doesn't have a problem with git because Linus made it. He had a problem with it because it separates pushes from commits. :-)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9292209

But otherwise, rms uses git quite alright. Let's not portray him as any crazier than he actually is.

hasteur2• 11 years ago

What other synonyms would you prefer using with respect to RMS and his obsessive-compulsive need to denounce Linus and Linux every time as "GNU Linux" instead of "Linux"?

jussij• 11 years ago

Feels like pressure from clang?

deng2• 11 years ago

Because clang is hosted with... subversion?

omouse• 11 years ago

Because distributed version control can help increase the pace of development and increase the usage of code reviews.

cstrahan• 11 years ago

Precisely. It's not unreasonable to suspect that using Distributed VCS would give GCC at least one advantage over Clang, which uses a Centralized VCS. It's a popular opinion that Clang is superior to GCC, so it would make sense that the GCC devs would want any advantage in terms of development time, and DVCS offers efficiency over CVCS. So it would be reasonable to suspect that the move might be "[due to] pressure from Clang", no?

... unless you chose to interpret that as "oh, hey, Clang is using Git, so we (GCC) should too!", which is both incorrect (Clang uses Subversion) and a fairly silly motivation regardless. If that interpretation is both incorrect and silly, why not try for a more reasonable/charitable interpretation like mine? Did it not occur to you?

I'm having a hard time understanding why jussij was down-voted... I suppose it's because people are quick to interpret others in ways that put them down, or because the down-voters lack the intelligence to make the more likely interpretation. Either way, it's disappointing.

atorralb• 11 years ago

Where is Linus when you need him?

vezzy-fnord8• 11 years ago

Linus hasn't been involved in Git for ages now. Junio Hamano has been running the show for the past decade.

orvr• 11 years ago

git is moving to GCC

GCC is moving to git

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