Hi Avi,

On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 11:55 AM, Avi Bryant <avi at dabbledb.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 9:57 AM, Eliot Miranda <eliot.miranda at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Yesterday I watched Linus Torvalds talk on G IT at Google.  Once you get
> > past his obnoxious public persona there is meat here, and its well worth
> the
> > 1 hour 10 minutes holding one's nose.  I think he's right on distributed
> > version control and so would like to see Monticello GIT integration.  One
> of
> > GIT's features that I think will be most synergistic with Smalltalk is
> that
> > it is content addressable.  That is, GIT can track the history of a
> function
> > even if it moves from one file to another.
> > The system isn't a file tracker, it is a content tracker (in fact, a
> content
> > addressible file system).  This removes lots of issues in the mapping of
> > Smalltalk methods to whatever the SCM system manages.  In GIT there would
> be
> > no problem mapping a class to a file.  One could still track the history
> of
> > a method within it with ease and GIT would still transmit only deltas,
> not
> > the entire file, when a part of the method changed.
>
> Yes, see my posts here:
>
> http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2008-June/129602.html
>
> http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2008-June/129605.html
>
> Git is modular enough that one could pretty easily, I think, replace
> its directory-of-files <=> content-tree mapping with a smalltalk-image
> <=> content-tree mapping and leave the majority of the system intact.
>
> Avi
>

In
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2008-June/129602.html
you state

I personally believe that we're better off with Smalltalk-specific
version control, but if someone *is* looking at integration with more
mainstream tools, I would strongly suggest they start with git rather
than SVN.

Avi

and
I want to emphatically agree with you that we want integrated
Smalltalk-specific version control. Lets say integrated
Smaltalk-centric rathe rthan Smalltalk-specific because there is
benefit in other tools & systems being able to access
the source repository's contents without using Smalltalk (e.g. web serving,
extracting documentation, bootstrapping and I'm sure much more).  But none
of this prevents using Git as a back-end.  Git seems to have several key
advantages (that I didn't mention at first; they're in the talk) that we can
use.

First, being distributed (based on divergent replicated repositories) there
is no centralisation, no dependency on a server which, if it goes down, one
can't work without.  There is much higher performance because data is local
(until one merges by pulling from other repositories).  Second, there is
protection against corruption (actually corruption detection) because
contents are thoroughly check-summed.  Most importantly
content-addressability means mapping of Smalltalk to files is easier and not
much of an issue.

But I'm not sure I buy the mapping of an image to the repository.  I would
rather browse packages than images (e.g. a packages subdirectory containing
a directory per package) and I still want the changes file for crash
recovery.  But thats a tension right there.  Does one keep Smalltalk
structures like the changes file and their support or go the whole hog and
just use Git for all source?  Personally I want to keep as many of the tools
in Smalltalk as possible so I can fix and extend them as I'm working.  A
large wadge of C should be kept in the back ground as much as possible.  Its
a file system after all.

Eliot
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