The 5th issue of the msysGit Herald

The 5th issue of the msysGit Herald

[Johannes Schindelin]

Good morning git land!

This lovely dark 4am (see http://youtube.com/watch?v=yXi6hg90LUU) is 
as good an occasion as any to offer to you the 5th issue of the 
msysGit Herald, the not-quite-biweekly news letter to keep you 
informed about msysGit, the effort to bring one of the most powerful 
Source Code Management systems to the poor souls stuck with Windows. 

These are the covered topics:

	git-gui and git-fetch

	git-svn

	cvsps

	git.git, mingw.git and 4msysgit.git closing ranks



Seems like this edition is mostly about transport... which is a good 
sign. It means that the installer has no more issues and we can 
concentrate on getting git on Windows to work. 


git-gui and git-fetch
=====================

Some time ago, git-gui could call git-fetch to update the remotes, but 
it popped up a new cmd window. This was ugly, and at some stage Shawn 
Pearce, the maintainer of git-gui, changed some parts to avoid that. 
Unfortunately, this broke fetching from within git-gui. 

Warning: technical explanation ahead! 

The problem is this: apparently there are two different kinds of 
processes on Windows (actually three, but let's not make things 
complicated, and for the same reason, let's not play the obvious pun 
on Microsoft): graphical and console processes. 

Whenever you start a console process from a graphical process, you 
have to provide it with a console instance, which would be inherited 
from the calling process if that were a console process, too. But in 
our case, a graphical process calls a console process (this works), 
which in turn calls another console process (this doesn't). 

So the symptom is that git-fetch, called from git-gui, does not pop up 
a cmd window, but ssh, which is called from git-fetch for ssh:// urls, 
does. 

I suspected a bug in Tcl/Tk, which might have been fixed in version 
8.5b2, so I compiled it and tested it, but the behaviour is still the 
same. At least we now have a script in our repository to conveniently 
compile and install Tcl/Tk, should the need ever arise again! 

Steffen Prohaska (see interview in the fourth Herald) and Johannes 
Sixt (see interview in the second Herald) are currently hard at work 
to flesh out this issue, and maybe the solution lies in using Putty's 
plink instead of MSys' ssh. 

Or maybe we will find some clever way to replace the spawnvpe() call 
with a CreateProcess() call which forces the console instance to be 
inherited by the called process. Hannes suggested that a possible 
reason is our heavy usage of dup2(), which might be helped by using 
CreateProcess(), but only time, and a fix, will tell what happens 
here. 


git-svn
=======

It seems that quite a few people want to have a working git-svn in 
msysGit. In our bug tracker, this problem comes in disguise such as 
"Digest.pm is missing". 

Alas, it is not as easy as that... Perl is an MSys program (remember, 
MSys gives you Unix-like paths relative to the install location), and 
compiling that came with its own set of surprises: you need to use a 
different compiler than for MinGW programs! 

As I wrote in the third Herald, Simon Sasburg was hard at work to get 
it to compile, and finally succeeded. But dynamically linked modules 
(otherwise known as DLLs) would not work, instead resulting in 
Windows' version of a segmentation fault. 

A few more days of trial and error led to the discovery of a source 
package of Perl for MSys, which was successfully munged into a 
quilt-like setup: we now have a script to download Perl's sources, 
patch them with our set of patches, build, install and prepare 
everything for commit. 

The next steps are easy: git-svn's dependencies MIME-Base64, Digest 
and Digest-MD5 are nice to build and install. 

The bigger chunk will be to get subversion and its Perl module to 
compile, especially given the dependency of the Apache Runtime (APR): 
subversion's configure complains that it was not found, and the 
documentation suggest to -- you guessed it -- checking it out with 
subversion. 

Stay tuned. 


cvsps
=====

While working at git-svn, I also though about git-cvsimport. This tool 
heavily depends on cvsps, a program which was inspired by the 
PatchSets of the source code management system git set out to replace. 
It is not all that trivial to compile cvsps on MSys, though, since it 
really loves our good old friend, fork(). 

Alas, Peer Sommerlund already worked on compiling this on Windows, and 
was friendly enough to export his Mercurial commits as plain patches, 
which soon found their way into a git repository. Now cvsps compiles 
fine, but cvsimport still fails to work, probably because Peer's 
patches make a few assumptions about the cvs program he used: cvsnt. 

It's likely not hard to work out the kinks until it works, but the 
time to do so successfully avoided finding me. 


git.git, mingw.git and 4msysgit.git closing ranks
=================================================

The official repository for git is git.git, maintained by Junio C 
Hamano. It does not contain any support for MinGW, because the port is 
not polished enough yet. Johannes "Hannes" Sixt maintains the official 
port to MinGW in the mingw.git fork of Junio's repository, and since 
the msysGit project started during Hannes' vacation, mingw.git was 
forked yet again, as 4msysgit.git. 

It is not totally superfluous to have separate repositories for these 
projects, because they differ in workflow and focus. For example, one 
of the big goals of the msysGit project was to provide an integrated 
installer which comes with everything you will need to run git on 
Windows (including MSys with its bash and perl), while the MinGW port 
tries to avoid the dependency on MSys as much as possible. 

But recently Hannes has succeeded in polishing a few topics from 
mingw.git to the point where Junio included them in git.git. There is 
no MinGW specific code yet, but the foundations are laid. 

In related news, Steffen Prohaska has undertaken some tremendous 
effort to merge mingw.git's 'master' branch into 4msysgit.git's 
'devel' branch. Maybe we succeed at some stage to close in totally on 
mingw.git, and then we'll probably move our history to some 
"historical" branch, and just keep with mingw.git's master. 

Re: The 5th issue of the msysGit Herald

[Jakub Narebski]

Johannes Schindelin wrote:

> Good morning git land!
> 
> This lovely dark 4am (see http://youtube.com/watch?v=yXi6hg90LUU) is 
> as good an occasion as any to offer to you the 5th issue of the 
> msysGit Herald, the not-quite-biweekly news letter to keep you 
> informed about msysGit, the effort to bring one of the most powerful 
> Source Code Management systems to the poor souls stuck with Windows. 

Is this info (and previous issues of "msysGit Herald") available somewhere
on the net? And I don't mean here git mailing list archives, or Google
Groups web interface...

Perhaps it is time for git to have besides Git Homepage and Git Wiki also
Git Blog or Git Feed (with announcements, what's in... and herald). What do
you think?

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Warsaw, Poland
ShadeHawk on #git

Re: The 5th issue of the msysGit Herald

[Johannes Schindelin]

Hi,

[please Cc: me...]

On Tue, 13 Nov 2007, Jakub Narebski wrote:

> Is this info (and previous issues of "msysGit Herald") available 
> somewhere on the net?

Yes.  It is on the Wiki, too, and there is the "herald" branch in 
msysgit/historical-msysgit.git on repo.or.cz.

Hth,
Dscho

Re: The 5th issue of the msysGit Herald

[Jakub Narebski]

Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> On Tue, 13 Nov 2007, Jakub Narebski wrote:
> 
>> Is this info (and previous issues of "msysGit Herald") available 
>> somewhere on the net?
> 
> Yes.  It is on the Wiki, too, and there is the "herald" branch in 
> msysgit/historical-msysgit.git on repo.or.cz.

Ah. Yes, it is available at

  http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/wiki/MSysGitHerald5

I somehow missed it when searching. Perhaps because MSysGit wiki 
FrontPage (Main_Page) is practically nonexistent; it does not contain 
links to "msysGit Herald" issues.

Thanks a lot.

P.S. Perhaps this link should be put in the body of msysGit Herald?

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland

Re: The 5th issue of the msysGit Herald

[Junio C Hamano]

Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com> writes:

> Perhaps it is time for git to have besides Git Homepage and Git Wiki also
> Git Blog or Git Feed (with announcements, what's in... and herald). What do
> you think?

I miss the "Kernel Traffic" (and its cousin, the unfortunate
first and only issue of "Git Traffic").

If you are stepping up as the chief "Git Traffic" editor (with
help from others), I'd imagine it would be greatly appreciated
by the community.

I certainly would.

Re: The 5th issue of the msysGit Herald

[Jakub Narebski]

Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com> writes:
> 
>> Perhaps it is time for git to have besides Git Homepage and Git Wiki also
>> Git Blog or Git Feed (with announcements, what's in... and herald). What do
>> you think?
> 
> I miss the "Kernel Traffic" (and its cousin, the unfortunate
> first and only issue of "Git Traffic").
> 
> If you are stepping up as the chief "Git Traffic" editor (with
> help from others), I'd imagine it would be greatly appreciated
> by the community.
> 
> I certainly would.

...and a buckefull of time, please... 

What I meant to have on blog, or rather in feed was those "What's in...",
"What's cooking...", "[ANNOUNCE]..." and "msysGit Herald" posts, not
git traffic digest. Because while I think first can be automated and
does not need manual intervention, doing the digest... well...

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland

Re: The 5th issue of the msysGit Herald

[Julian Phillips]

On Tue, 13 Nov 2007, Jakub Narebski wrote:

> Junio C Hamano wrote:
>> Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> Perhaps it is time for git to have besides Git Homepage and Git Wiki also
>>> Git Blog or Git Feed (with announcements, what's in... and herald). What do
>>> you think?
>>
>> I miss the "Kernel Traffic" (and its cousin, the unfortunate
>> first and only issue of "Git Traffic").
>>
>> If you are stepping up as the chief "Git Traffic" editor (with
>> help from others), I'd imagine it would be greatly appreciated
>> by the community.
>>
>> I certainly would.
>
> ...and a buckefull of time, please...
>
> What I meant to have on blog, or rather in feed was those "What's in...",
> "What's cooking...", "[ANNOUNCE]..." and "msysGit Herald" posts, not
> git traffic digest. Because while I think first can be automated and
> does not need manual intervention, doing the digest... well...

Something like this perhaps?

http://gitrss.q42.co.uk/

-- 
Julian

  ---
Consensus Terrorism:
 	The process that decides in-office attitudes and behavior.
 		-- Douglas Coupland, "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated
 		   Culture"

Re: The 5th issue of the msysGit Herald

[Jakub Narebski]

On Tue, 28 Nov 2007, Julian Phillips wrote:
> On Tue, 13 Nov 2007, Jakub Narebski wrote:

>> What I meant to have on blog, or rather in feed was those "What's in...",
>> "What's cooking...", "[ANNOUNCE]..." and "msysGit Herald" posts, not
>> git traffic digest. Because while I think first can be automated and
>> does not need manual intervention, doing the digest... well...
> 
> Something like this perhaps?
> 
> http://gitrss.q42.co.uk/

Thanks a lot!

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland

Re: The 5th issue of the msysGit Herald

[Johannes Gilger]

On 28/11/07 16:33, Julian Phillips wrote:
> Something like this perhaps?
>
> http://gitrss.q42.co.uk/

Hi Julian,

somehow the feed does not work for me at all. It is not displayed 
correctly in the firefox feed-preview or in google reader. Not correctly 
here meaning: no linebreaks.

Greetings,
Jojo

-- 
Johannes Gilger <heipei@hackvalue.de>
http://hackvalue.de/heipei/
GPG-Key: 0x42F6DE81
GPG-Fingerprint: BB49 F967 775E BB52 3A81  882C 58EE B178 42F6 DE81

Re: The 5th issue of the msysGit Herald

[Julian Phillips]

On Wed, 28 Nov 2007, Johannes Gilger wrote:

> On 28/11/07 16:33, Julian Phillips wrote:
>> Something like this perhaps?
>>
>> http://gitrss.q42.co.uk/
>
> Hi Julian,
>
> somehow the feed does not work for me at all. It is not displayed
> correctly in the firefox feed-preview or in google reader. Not correctly
> here meaning: no linebreaks.

Ah, yes.  Sorry.

Hopefully it should now display correctly, seems to work in firefox, ie7 
and safari.

-- 
Julian

  ---
You'll always be,
What you always were,
Which has nothing to do with,
All to do, with her.
 		-- Company