MSysGit:MSysGitHerald4

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Good morning git land!

20 years after the black monday, which happens to be exactly three days after the 164th (official) birthday of the quaternions, is as good an occasion as any to bring to you the fourth 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:

• Spanking new Inno installer

• New naming scheme & new release

• git gui

• Interview with Steffen Prohaska

• Calling git from cmd.exe

• Historic notes

Spanking new Inno installer

As mentioned in the last Herald, Sebastian Schuberth (with some help of Steffen Prohaska) started to replace the 7-Zip installer that I built with my heart and soul. I even came so far as to work around Windows' refusal to delete the uninstaller while that is running (which would usually be its last action on other platforms).

Incidentally, this uninstaller was also a nice small example how to write an elegant Win32 program without bloat. My opinion might be biased because I wrote it.

But I have to admit that the installer based on Inno looks sleeker, more professional, and is easier to extend.

It uses the same LZMA compressor that 7-Zip used, so there is (almost) no downside regarding the size of the installer.

The usual options, such as adding a Start Menu, a Quick Launch item, a Desktop item, a simple Explorer extension, and an uninstaller, come basically for free with Inno. Well, not exactly for free, but Sebastian did all the hard work, so that we all could benefit.

From what I hear, this installer is also able to run on DOS based Windows such as Windows 95. Yeah!

The downsides of using Inno that I have encountered so far are not important in comparison:

You can no longer just unzip the installer with 7-Zip. But if that should turn out to be a major problem for many people (which I doubt), we can still just add one line to automatically generate a .7z file at the same time as the installer. I came upon a little project named "innounp" (on sourceforge.net), though, which purportedly unpacks installers made with Inno Setup. Maybe at some stage there is also a 7-Zip plugin ;-)

The installer was easily built using Linux, by making a 7-Zip archive and prepending the self-extracting module and the config file. Well, Wine is not there yet, but hopefully it will soon.

The installer does not run under Wine. But then, neither did the 7-Zip based installer.

New naming scheme & new release

There was a bit of a stir when we realised that not everybody understands the differences between GitMe, msysGit and WinGit.

So we sat down on the msysgit list and thought about it a bit.

There are basically two different projects: msysGit, which is the development environment which is needed to compile git and friends.

And there is the installer which delivers the compiled programs to those who do not want to work on, but with, git. We used to call this WinGit (I liked it very much because of the connotation of "to wing it").

But Steffen Prohaska pointed out, rightfully so, that it should be Git-<version-and-stuff>.exe.

Since our current versions are not as smooth-running as git on POSIX platforms, we decided to go with the "preview" postfix, until we are reasonably comfortable to declare it "beta". Note: in the good tradition of Open Source, our "preview" versions are probably more usable than some XP^WGolden versions of commercial software.

The version number will be that of the git release we are basing our installer on, and we plan to have indicators "rc<n>" once our project is stable enough that we are reasonably certain that it does not have fatal flaws. Also, the timestamp of its build will be part of the file name, and we will tag the exact state in msysgit.git which this build was based on.

So we now have the first official preview of Git on MSys. By the old naming scheme, this would have been "WinGit 0.3 alpha".

It was created with Inno (see previous story), and we expect the user experience to be much smoother than with previous releases. There is one known issue, though: pull/fetch does not work in git gui (also see next story).

git gui

git gui is a really nice program, and as I often said, I consider it more porcelain than a gui, since it uses the git core directly, instead of wrapping around porcelain commands.

The user experience I had with git gui made me think that this should be the primary interface Windows users should be confronted with, not the command line.

The major problem we had in msysGit is that git-gui was to be launched from the Start Menu, or a QuickLaunch icon. This is in contrast to the shell, where you usually start git gui in a working directory.

So we needed some method to choose a working directory. Mike Pape put some work into that, but got too much work to do with the day job. While he was busy with non-gittish things, Shawn Pearce went busy writing a wizard to select an existing directory, create a new one, or clone a repository.

One issue we did not yet properly resolve is that fetch/pull does not work from within git gui. For the moment, you have to use the Git bash. I suspect that this issue will disappear automagically when we merge with newer git which have the builtin fetch.

Steffen Prohaska contributed the "open recent" feature, so there is nothing left preventing our taking over the (Windows-)world!

Interview with Steffen Prohaska

> 1) How did you get involved with Git?

I was looking for a simple version control system to handle my personal Mac OS X documents. Mac OS X applications save data as directories containing related files that together form a document. A version control system must not store data in such a directory.

I worked with CVS, which I am still using on a daily basis, and tried svn. But both need to store data in every subdirectory they manage.

I stumbled over a couple of other systems, like monotone, arch, darcs, and finally git. Git was quite easy to install and did what I needed; well, after I found out about

   git-ls-files -z --others SomeBundle | \
   git-update-index --add -z --stdin
   git-commit -a	

I created my first git repository around April 2006 and have these two lines in a script there. And I still use them to handle nearly all of my documents.

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

Git did always a great job managing my own documents. But two deficiencies kept me for a long time from advertising it as a replacement for our CVS: Git didn't work on Windows and git didn't provide a mechanism that is today known as sub-modules.

When it turned out that sub-modules will become available and Windows support (autocrlf) was introduced, I started to evaluate a migration of our development team from CVS to git. The need for a new system intensified after it became clear that we'll have to handle three sub-groups in the future with different release schedules.

I was pretty convinced that git would be the right system. But Windows support was just not good enough. So I started to work on this. A bit earlier I needed to debug CVS import. If I remember correctly the first patch I sent was on git-cvsexportcommit.

> 3) What do you like most in Git?

When I started I liked most the lightweight installation and easy setup of fresh repositories.

Today, I like most the great support for automatic merging, rerere, and git-mergetool.

> 4) What do you hate most in Git?

Git asks me two times for my password during 'git fetch' when I forgot to unlock my ssh-key. And I can't reasonably explain this fact to newbies.

I often need to find small workarounds for minor deficiencies in the user interface. Especially getting started with git is not as easy as it could be. git-* matches approximately 150 commands. That's overwhelming.

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

When I learnt about rerere. It's magic.

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

When I understood that git-cvsimport messes up CVS history and cannot be used for importing from CVS. It was really hard to find a working alternative. The documentation didn't help much.

I was also quite desperate when I understood that git will never run in Cygwin's textmode.

> 7) In what environment do you work?

Mac OS X, Linux (x86_64, i386, ia64), XP, XP64, Vista.

> 8) What other hobbies do you have?

besides git? ... hmm ... maybe jogging counts as a hobby.

> 9) What is your favourite movie?

Pulp Fiction.

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

I wish to see all core features with same quality on Windows as on Unix. In addition, everything which is needed to support cross-platform projects that look on Windows as if they were pure Windows projects and on Unix as if they were pure Unix projects.

A leaner user interface would be nice that is more focused on the essential workflows and makes it easier to explain git. The average developer shouldn't need to know too many details about git before he is able to participate in a shared repository workflow.

Steffen

Calling git from cmd.exe

As mentioned in the story "The war between cmd and bash" in the first issue of this little tabloid, some people prefer to avoid bash.

The simplest solution to allow this would be to add msysGit's bin/ to the PATH. Alas, it is not as easy as that.

Windows has its own versions of "sort" and "find", and regular Windows users' scripts might rely on finding those, while git relies on finding more POSIXy versions of those programs.

Therefore we have a cmd/ directory containing wrappers for git and gitk, and the new installer adds this directory to the PATH. (Actually you can choose between a few different options...)

That should make everybody happy.

Historic notes

Reading Jakub's results of the git survey instigated me to investigate when msysGit was born (under a different name...). We had a tremendous progress since, and it almost felt as two years had gone by since I started this thing.

Alas, the first commit I ever made on my mingw branch was on Tue Jun 20 19:13:02 2006 +0200

A long time nevertheless. From the commit messages I found that the first time I fixed a test -- which is my best indicator that I got something running; I did not manifest a "Hooray, first time it does something" in any commit message -- was on Tue Sep 19 15:11:29 2006 +0200

So it took me two months, on and off, to get it to run. Of course, this version was so lousy that it was only barely self-hosting. Since I could not get vi to run on my MinGW setup, I did the commits using -m.

I also had not found out yet that bash in an Rxvt was not able to call "less" properly, and I had to pipe "git log | less" to stop the output from whizzing by as fast as Douglas Adams' deadlines.

Reading further in my logs, I stopped working on my mingw branch on Wed Sep 20 17:38:35 2006 +0200, certainly because I did not feel the need, and the major obstacles had been tackled, and I got bored with it. Or my boss made me work for a change. Something along those lines.

All the better for the many eager Windows users that Hannes Sixt took up the ball, and committed his first version on Fri Dec 22 11:43:50 2006 +0100, although you can see in the logs that it was recommitted (for the last time, I guess) on Fri Jan 19 16:21:41 2007 +0100.

Since then, he made steady progress, with a few helpers helping out from time to time.

The next big turn was the kick off of the msysGit project... the rest is history.