[Carpet] Using git as version control system

[Erik Schnetter]

I am thinking about moving Carpet to using git <http://git.or.cz/> as  
version control system.  I believe that git has several advantages  
over darcs (and also over cvs and subversion):

- It is supported by a large community.  That means it is available on  
more systems, and there are more supporting tools, such as graphical  
interfaces.

- The concept of darcs is to store patches, the concept of git is to  
store snapshots of the repository.  These concepts are duals of each  
other.  Both are more generic than e.g. cvs and svn, which store the  
current state as a linear sequence of changes.  This makes certain  
operations much more efficient.

- The conflict handling of git is different from darcs; I believe it  
is more intuitive, and circumvents a known problem in darcs where  
certain conflict-handling operations would take a very long time.

- Git supports, like darcs, easy ways for cherry-picking changes, and  
also creating, tracking, and merging branches.

- Of course, git is truly decentralised like darcs, allowing people to  
work off-line, and to develop code in distributed groups.  Other  
repositories for Cactus arrangements could easily also switch over to  
git.



Backward compatibility is important, but too much of it would take too  
much time.  I think a good balance is:

- The old cvs and darcs repositories won't go away, you can continue  
to access older version in the old ways.

- Similarly, the easy way of downloading Carpet via http (e.g. using  
wget) will remain available.  You cannot commit/push using http, but  
you can still send patches by email.

- There won't be a mirror for write access to the git repository via  
cvs, svn, or darcs.  I don't think that this is worth the effort.

- Write access to the Carpet repository will still be via ssh keys or  
a similar mechanism.

-erik

-- 
Erik Schnetter <schnetter at cct.lsu.edu>   http://www.cct.lsu.edu/~eschnett/

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