Re: SourceForge reorganization may affect gnuplot development site

[Daniel J S. <dan...@ie...>]

On 10/04/2012 10:15 PM, Allin Cottrell wrote:
> On Thu, 4 Oct 2012, Daniel J Sebald wrote:
>
>> On 10/04/2012 04:35 AM, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
>>> On Thu, Oct 4, 2012 at 10:29 AM, Daniel J Sebald wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I'm not sure the repositories themselves are being replaced, but the
>>>> other items are changing (e.g., bug tracker, etc.).  However, CVS seems
>>>> to be downplayed a bit and only SVN, mercurial and git are listed as
>>>> supported.  So, if when upgrading, gnuplot is forced to choose one of
>>>> those three, then it is essentially the same as replacing.  Not that
>>>> "upgrading" from CVS is bad.  (I've used mercurial pretty much and that
>>>> seems nice.)
>>>
>>> Probably not at this point, but I suspect that sooner or later CVS
>>> will be phased out and it might happen that it won't be supported in
>>> future at all. [...]
>>
>> I would say that either git or mercurial would be a better choice than
>> SVN.
>
> No doubt opinions will differ on this. Svn is closest to CVS, and
> therefore easiest to learn for people who are used to CVS, while
> offering various advantages over the latter. Git is very
> full-featured and is the VC system used by many leading open-source
> projects (notably the Linux kernel and the GNU C library) and
> therefore may be worth learning even though it's not close to CVS.
>
> For me personally, mercurial would be the last choice, simply
> because up to this point no software that I'm interested in resides
> in a mercurial repository.

Another thing to consider is the HTML-based interface for the 
repository.  That can often be helpful for browsing the latest 
developments, patches that might have introduced a bug, etc.  Also, if I 
want to describe something to someone who may not be energized enough to 
clone the repository I'll give a link to the HTML file.

Here's an example of mercurial's interface:

http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave

which I believe is part of the mercurial software, i.e., just set up an 
address for the repository and it will automatically generate the page 
in a browser.  The one category in the menu list I'd like to point out 
is the "graph", something that git doesn't appear to have (or I'm not 
aware of).  Here's an example of a git repository HTMl interface:

http://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=summary

The graph shows the branch history for the project, e.g., where they 
bifurcate, where they combine.  This is something that can be really 
useful on a bigger project.  (Does gnuplot need such a thing?  Not 
sure.)  It's not the best graph tool I've seen, as it is 
line/page-based, but one gets used to it.

The best graph and diff utilities I've seen are for a commercial product 
called Perforce.  It's graph is graphical based where one can zoom in on 
the graph, scroll a position bar, click on a node and it takes a person 
to that commit.  Perforce's diff utility will display the before and 
after file side-by-side with color coded adds and deletes.  It's really 
nice.  git/mercurial seem a tie in this category tipping toward 
mercurial for its graph printout, which could be better.

Dan