Re: StGIT vs. guilt: What's the difference?

On Fri, Jun 15, 2007 at 03:59:24PM +0100, Catalin Marinas wrote:

I haven't tried quilt either but, if it uses plain text patches, the
disadvantage might be the losing of the three-way merge when pushing a
patch onto the stack. The solution is to remember which commit the
patch applies to, switch the tree, apply the patch and merge with
HEAD.

Note that I haven't tried guilt either.

However, storing diffs is certainly a great way to interact with
legacy SCMs, and there are situations where guilt is certainly more
suited than stgit.  Eg, on a project where you have to use CVS, and
you have to maintain changes to a Linux kernel, and you want to store
the history of a series of patches, guilt will be much easier to use
than stgit.

We may even want to implement something in stgit to ease such
integration with legacy SCMs - eg. an option to auto-export the stack
on push/refresh should not be too hard to implement.

StGIT might have some more features as it is older but I see a lot of
development is going on with guilt. Another difference is that StGIT
is written in Python and guilt uses shell scripts (some people don't
like the dependency on Python).

Well, people may not like python, but IMHO it is a lot easier to learn
it if you don't know it (that's what I did, although I did not start
from zero), than writing a robust and maintainable software of even
moderate complexity in shell script.  Shell script may be good for
prototyping or gluing tools in a simple way, but for advanced sofware
on which to rely to store my own data, it is just not really suited.

Best regards,
-- 
Yann