x.org is Hacker Trash

[Sean]

On Fri, 30 Mar 2007 12:20:51 +0300
Daniel Stone <daniel at fooishbar.org> wrote:

> You can use the ModuleVersions stuff to work out which tags you need for
> which module, yes.  But no, it's not the goal of git to allow people to
> build specific versions of module sets.  It's possible, but personally I
> think the whole distributed revision control that makes merging trivial
> thing is slightly more important.

Martin Waitz has produced an extension to Git that allows tracking many
git repos under a single meta-repo.  AFAIU this will be included in a new
version of Git "soonish".  This would allow all the current Xorg repos to
be tracked as a single unit with release tags etc.  I'm not that
familiar with CVS, but this is apparently similar to the CVS modules
facility.

The nice thing about the above setup, if it were used by the xorg
release managers, is that it allows all of the current git repos to
continue being used exactly as they are today, while allowing someone
who wants to download and track them all as a single unit to do so as
well.

> Why would you want to download the entire git repositories of every
> single module, and then only use that to build one single version?  You
> seem to be quite keen on making this hard for yourself.

Well, many people want to build more than a single version; perhaps
to figure out when some feature stopped working, or just to track day
to day changes.  After an initial clone of a Git repository, only
deltas need to be downloaded, so it can be much more efficient than
downloading tarballs.  It's a convenient way to be a bleeding-edge tester.

Sean