MSysGit:MSysGitHerald2

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Good morning git land!

This lovely afternoon in St Andrews is as good an occasion as any to issue a new incarnation of the msysGit Herald, the not-quite-biweekly news letter to keep you informed about msysGit, the effort to bring one of the most powerful Source Code Management systems to the poor souls stuck with Windows.

These are the covered topics:

• WinGit 0.2

• What will be in WinGit 0.3?

• We're getting famous in China

• Compiling Perl from scratch

• Time for a new console?

• Interview with Johannes "Mr mingw.git" Sixt

• Still no concrete mingw/git.git merge plans yet

WinGit 0.2

By mistake, Perl was not properly installed with version 0.1 of WinGit. This is the most visible part that was fixed in 0.2.

However, in the meantime we got our "Issue" list (see home page) cut almost in half. Which means that we are mostly stuck with the hard problems ;-)

What will be in WinGit 0.3

What will be in 0.3? We have a proper uninstaller now. Yes, that means that "Git" will be in the "Add/Remove Software" list.

Also, curl, termcap, the completions, sh-add, and git-gui are actually installed.

Maybe we'll get to the state where a link to git gui is installed in addition to the "Git Shell", maybe we'll succeed in merging 1.5.3.2?

Who knows... ;-)

We're getting famous in China

Apparently, there is a blog talking (amongst other things, like the unfamous language flame war) about "Git on Windows" in China:

http://blog.csdn.net/turingbook/archive/2007/09/07/1775488.aspx

I am dyslexic when it comes to Chinese, but we got some hits from there...

Compiling Perl from scratch

We have an open issue called "Install scripts do not install perl modules for git-svn" (Issue 42). Unfortunately, it is not really as easy as that...

The Perl version we have does not come with valid MakeMaker information, and we are therefore unable to compile modules for Perl (even something as dirt-simple as Digest::MD5 does not work).

So we tried to compile Perl from scratch -- which opened another can of worms. It was not a problem at all to compile Perl for MinGW. Which means that the resulting binary does not have any clue about the MSys environment (think Unix style paths, and (worse!) no shell scripts).

An option would be to not care, and decouple Perl from MSys. Another option would be to get Perl compiled & linked to msys-1.0.dll.

This issue is not resolved yet.

Time for a new console?

The first publically available version of msysGit recommended Rxvt, until I realised that there were strange stderr/stdout issues, which prevented -- among other things -- the pager and ssh transport from working.

So we reverted back to cmd as the Terminal, which has its own set of shortcomings (does not do ANSI well, has Control-C issues, and the multi-line selection being a rectangular box is outright annoying, as well as the missing Shift+Insert binding to paste the clipboard).

Now, compiling (and possibly fixing) Rxvt seems to be out of reach for the moment, but Marius Storm-Olsen found the "Console" project:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/console

Unfortunately, this project does not work on Windows 95/98/ME, and I would have liked to retain backwards compatibility (some developers, yours truly included, do not have Windows boxen to develop, so they have to resort to emulated ones -- and 2k is a real hog there, opposed to 95).

However, since we already rely on the NT based family for our installer, that reason not to use Console seems to fall on the floor.

We would need to work on it, though: ATM it has problems with selections, and recompiling is made difficult by the ATL dependency.

Interview with Johannes "Mr mingw.git" Sixt

Hannes announced an initial official version of the MinGW port of git on January 19th, 2007:

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/37202

For quite some time, he was the only one working on this port. Most of the smoothness of the msysGit effort is his fault.

So here, without further ado, the interview:

> 1) How did you get involved with Git?

In our shop, CVS was used for years. I have been working with patch sets because it did not allow the workflow that I wanted - namely to construct a series of changes before making them public.

When the news came out that Linus was working on a new VCS, I was following its development closely. From the discussions I discovered that git would be the tool that allowed my desired workflow.

In order to get acquainted with git, I used it on my Linux projects (KDbg, Cinelerra).

> 2) What were the reasons that you started working on Git?

In our shop, which develops software for Windows, the requirement arouse to have several different, but related versions of the same product - which is a setup that we would not be able to solve with CVS, but it would be a breeze with git.

But we needed git on Windows. And since I dislike cygwin (for no good reason actually), I decided to start the native port of git to Windows using MSYS ang MinGW.

> 3) What do you like most in Git?

- Easy merging with real merge history - Massage a series of changes into proper shape before making it public

> 4) What do you hate most in Git?

You're kiddin'!

> 5) What was the most surprising moment when working with Git?

It merged a change I made in an old branch in a file that was moved in the new branch to a new location. IOW, merge across renames. Really, I was so surprised - I wanted to start the manual merge when I discovered that git had done all the work for me.

> 6) What was the most frustrating moment when working with Git?

Just the other day, I wanted to fetch a set of changes from a public repo into my test repo in order to cherry-pick from them - and it automatically fetched all the tags. But, the heck, I don't want them tags here, just the commits. I just can't figure out how to avoid the automatic fetching of tags.

> 7) In what environment do you work?

Linux (SUSE); Windows 2000, XP.

> 8) What other hobbies do you have?

Cuddling the brats and changing nappies - does that count as a hobby?

> 9) What is your favourite movie?

You think I have time to watch movies?

> 10) What are your visions for Git? (I.e. where do you want it to go?)

Seriously, I'm not a visionair.

On 'nix, git will be perfect when it is able to seamlessly serve the KDE source.

On Windows, git still has too many problems that we don't need a vision, yet.

-- Hannes

Still no concrete mingw/git.git merge plans yet

As mentioned in the first issue of this news letter, I sent a rather long list of relatively small and well contained projects, that in total would mean a complete merge of the mingw/4msysgit port back into git.git:

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/57163

Unfortunately, there have not been any takers (just a few "would it not be better to have this in git.git" sayers).

In related news, it seems to be awfully more common for Windows users than for other people to have the attitude "I am the user. You have to help me." (Remember that in our case, the users are developers, too, so they should be able to help themselves.)

Do not let yourself fool into thinking that all Windows users are like that. Just enough to annoy.

However, nobody stops changing until eaten by the bugs, so all of those who think "well, I might be able to do a small thing, just to prove that bastard wrong": follow the above link, read the mail (you can even just randomly jump around, and only read parts of it), pick a target, and say so on the msysGit mailing list (msysgit@googlegroups.com).