[Live-demo] Improved translation status

[Jim Klassen]

My experiences with SVN and git boil down to this:

Git is better than SVN for source control.  It is very good at working with things that behave as essentially a collection of related text based source files.  It falls down when there are many semi-related modules and it falls down when there are many files that cannot be merged (binaries, xml, etc).  The Live project, being more of an aggregation rather than a typical project, hits both of these weaknesses in git.

Where SVN shines is when you need essentially a versioned filesystem.  There are many types of files, many people contributing, and you want to be able to efficiently store history (including binaries) and recovering to a known working state is more important than merging multiple changes to one file.  SVN's ability to track file copies, not needing to download the whole history of every part of the project to work on a small part (or need to split the project into semi-arbitrary sub-modules and then shallow clone which limits functionality) helps.

So, as much as I prefer developing code with git, I think SVN is better suited for the Live project. 

Just my 2¢.

Jim 

On Nov 12, 2012, at 1:46 PM, maplabs at light42.com wrote:

> based on my recent commercial software development experiences:
> 
> * git has the advanage in branching and merging; very useful when developers are adding substantial new features that require breaking changes, common in the early stages of big web and desktop projects
> 
> * git has better web-based analytics; lots of neat charting and tracking and such
> 
> * git has popularity and 'cool', web hosting is widely available; young developers are more likely to start with it and use git with each other on cutting edge projects
> 
> * subversion is well known and very stable
> 
> * subversion works well enough with existing multi function support apps, like Trac
> 
> * subversion does not encourage branching and merging, in fact it is difficult to do even for skilled users
> 
> The Live project does not have a lot of forking and branching; in fact, stability is key and growing to be one of the core strengths of the Live project. 
> Ask the question, does adding new features frequently require breaking changes to other parts of the environment while developing? no, in fact, the project is designed to maximize the ability of very widely disparate contributors to add while not interfering with others. 
> In My Own Opinion: Since I am old enough to have lived through some very large changes in the sofware world, notably the conquest by Windows of the world's PCs, I am not at all convinced by someone saying that this or that change is "inevitable."   In my experience that phrase is more often abused than accurate. Since it reminds me of the hogwash that Microsoft used to leverage FUD, I dont like that phrase at all. 
> --
> In summary, I don think there is very much rush to use Git instead of subversion. I dont think many of the core strengths of Git apply much to the Live project. I think subversion is working well enough now. I agree with CameronShorter that using different source control systems at the same time is not something to do lightly. 
> If people want to use Git now they can, it is straightforward to copy a subversion snapshot to Git. It is *not* straightforward to go the other way, that I know of... 
> --
> Brian Hamlin
> OSGeo California Chapter
> 
> On Mon, 12 Nov 2012 18:28:39 +0200, Angelos Tzotsos <gcpp.kalxas at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/12/2012 01:19 PM, Cameron Shorter wrote:
>> > On 12/11/12 11:23, Angelos Tzotsos wrote:
>> >> FYI we have moved the greek translation maintenance to GitHub to >> attract more contributors, since GitHub seems to be very popular in >> the Greek OSGeo Chapter:
>> >> https://github.com/kalxas/OSGeo-Live-el >
>> > Angelos, I'd be interested to hear a bit more about how you are using > git. > I'm a bit nervous about using two different version control systems. >
>> We had been using a separate SVN server until now and I was responsible for merging and updating the documents in the OSGeo SVN in order to ensure the quality of the documents uploaded. So there is actually no reason to worry about that. We just moved to git, because part of my job is much easier with "Pull Requests". Actually non-translator members of our Chapter find it much easier to jump in and fix minor issues (like typos, spelling etc) than before. 
>> I would definitely suggest moving the whole project to Git eventually, but this would require OSGeo infrastructure for Git and Trac to be in place. I recall Alex saying that there is a plan for such deployments. 
>> Best,
>> Angelos
>> 
>> -- Angelos Tzotsos
>> Remote Sensing Laboratory
>> National Technical University of Athens
>> http://users.ntua.gr/tzotsos
>> 
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