[Sparkle] LaunchPad + Bazaar vs. Lighthouse + Git[Hub]

[Christopher Bailey]

I literally just finished replying to a comment on my blog where someone
else said Git was complex.  What I'd suggest is you take another look - try
it and see.  What I would argue is that Git is no harder to use, and in
fact, not only easier, but far better, than SVN for daily tasks.  When I
first started hearing about Git and so on, it seemed weird and wacky, and
like extra crap that I didn't need, and I was confused by all the praise.
 But then I listened to a few more folks on it, read the tutorial, watched
the PeepCode tutorial, and tried it.  I would say that in literally a matter
of days, it was like I couldn't get rid of SVN fast enough.  At this point I
now have only a single project I work on that remains in SVN.  It is a
monster with massive history and many many branches, and so will not be a
trivial move (unless we simply do an export and move that over, which we
might).  But, I've moved everything else.
The secondary aspect is that Git is screaming fast.  I argue that the speed
improvement over SVN alone is worth the switch.  You could use Git just like
you use SVN, never leveraging any of the other benefits/features, and the
speed increase alone would be worth it.  But then you will start to leverage
some of the other features like being able to work offline, like "rebase",
and some of the great stuff like merging commits, and of course the
branching just makes SVN look lame - it even makes Perforce's branching look
bad.

Now, throw on top of that GitHub, and the social and community features
around codebases that it provides and it's pretty damn stellar.  Yes, it
doesn't have the tight integration with an issue tracker as you mention, but
they are doing more and more in that area.  But it has some pretty nifty
things like being able to do comments on commits (and explicitly on lines of
code/particular changes), you can watch repos, they do give you a wiki, and
they've even just recently hooked up Pledgie and the ability to have a
donation setup right there on your GitHub project.

Therefore, I'd urge you to take another look at Git (and GitHub).  I am not
a Git expert, but use it every day, and have definitely sipped heavily of
its KoolAid, and thus will try to answer any questions you may have.

On Wed, May 7, 2008 at 8:02 PM, Andy Matuschak <andy at andymatuschak.org>
wrote:

> Hey, folks. Now that I've gotten that huge refactoring [
> http://andymatuschak.org/articles/2008/05/07/driving-up-the-walls] out of
> the way, I'd like to get things moving towards 1.5 and beyond. Maybe beyond.
> I've decided I'm only willing to keep working on Sparkle if it's not going
> to annoy me, and there are a few things that are annoying me:
> * The state of the codebase. With this refactoring, I'm mostly happy.
> There's a little more to do, but not a ton.
> * Trac. I hate Trac. I hate it in the face.
> * SVN. Someone sends me a patch, but it's for three versions ago, so I
> have to apply it by hand. And then projects which have their own
> modifications are permanently behind, so we get things like Adium 1.1
> exploding in a giant fireball.
>
> I think my plan right now is to switch to LaunchPad [http://launchpad.net],
> using Bazaar for RCS. The alternative is Lighthouse [
> http://lighthouseapp.com] with Git for RCS through GitHub [
> http://github.com].
>
> *LaunchPad+Bazaar:*
> Advantages:
> LaunchPad has "questions" as a separate thing from normal tickets. I like
> this a lot.
> LaunchPad has an "idea tracking" feature called Blueprints which could be
> really useful.
> The translations feature on LaunchPad could potentially be very useful.
> It's one site instead of two.
> Bazaar is a hell of lot easier to use than Git.
> Bazaar has friendly revision numbers.
> Disadvantages:
> Not quite as shiny as the alternative.
> Has a slightly Ubuntu-y taste.
> Feels "bigger".
> Bazaar doesn't have as good adoption as Git.
>
> *Lighthouse+Git[Hub]:*
> Advantages:
> Shiny and in fashion.
> More "powerful" in ways I probably don't care about.
> Disadvantages:
> Two sites instead of one; users have to register at both places.
> Git is more confusing.
> Doesn't have translations, blueprints, or questions.
> Lighthouse seems clumsy compared to LaunchPad in ways I can't describe.
>
> So I'm going to start working on making the former happen, but if there's
> a really good reason we should be using Lighthouse+Git[Hub], please let me
> know.
>
> - Andy Matuschak
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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>
>


-- 
Christopher Bailey
Cobalt Edge LLC
http://cobaltedge.com
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