Re: Switching from CVS to GIT

Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2007 13:39:12 +0100 (BST)
From: Johannes Schindelin <redacted>
cc: Daniel Barkalow <redacted>, raa.lkml@gmail.com, ae@op5.se, 
    tsuna@lrde.epita.fr, git@vger.kernel.org

quoted

As I wrote in my other message, using native APIs improves performance 
by at least a factor of two.

Somehow this does not appeal to my "portability is good" side.  You know, 
if we had to do such trickeries for every platform we support, we'd soon 
be as big as Subversion *cough*.

You have to decide whether you care about performance enough to do
that or not.  If you do, then introducing file I/O abstractions at
higher level than the normal ``use-library-functions'' method is not
such a hard problem, and doesn't make the binary larger because each
platform gets only its own backend.  In practice, I have found that in
most cases a few well-designed and strategically placed macros is all
you need.

For me, this is the most annoying part about programming Win32.  They went 
out of their way to make it incompatible with everything else, and as a 
consequence it is a PITA to maintain crossplatform programs.

Portability is a two-way street.  A program that wasn't designed to be
portable will by definition be hard to port.  To me, what's annoying
is a program that was designed around a single-OS model of APIs.

Cross-platform programs are not that hard if you design them to be
like that from the ground up.  I'm working for a firm that does that
for a living: we develop software that compiles and runs on Windows
and Linux from the same source.

Explorer often accesses files it should not lock.  
On the machine I test msysGit on, this is the most common reason for a 
test case to fail: it cannot delete the temporary directory, which 
_should_ be unused.  Indeed, a second after that, it _is_ unused.

One more reason not to launch Explorer, if you ask me ;-)  But maybe
you have valid reasons to do that.  All I can say is that I never saw
such problems, but then I don't usually run programs that rewrite
files in a frenzy.

Hi,

On Tue, 16 Oct 2007, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

quoted

Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2007 13:39:12 +0100 (BST)
From: Johannes Schindelin <redacted>
cc: Daniel Barkalow <redacted>, raa.lkml@gmail.com, ae@op5.se, 
    tsuna@lrde.epita.fr, git@vger.kernel.org

quoted

As I wrote in my other message, using native APIs improves 
performance by at least a factor of two.

Somehow this does not appeal to my "portability is good" side.  You 
know, if we had to do such trickeries for every platform we support, 
we'd soon be as big as Subversion *cough*.

You have to decide whether you care about performance enough to do
that or not.

Yes, I know that we'll have to use more special casing of Windows for 
performance reasons.  I was only lamenting that it would not need to be 
that way.  Just ignore me.

quoted

For me, this is the most annoying part about programming Win32.  They 
went out of their way to make it incompatible with everything else, 
and as a consequence it is a PITA to maintain crossplatform programs.

Portability is a two-way street.  A program that wasn't designed to be 
portable will by definition be hard to port.  To me, what's annoying is 
a program that was designed around a single-OS model of APIs.

You're obviously not talking about git here.

quoted

Explorer often accesses files it should not lock.  On the machine I 
test msysGit on, this is the most common reason for a test case to 
fail: it cannot delete the temporary directory, which _should_ be 
unused.  Indeed, a second after that, it _is_ unused.

One more reason not to launch Explorer, if you ask me ;-)  But maybe you 
have valid reasons to do that.  All I can say is that I never saw such 
problems, but then I don't usually run programs that rewrite files in a 
frenzy.

Funny.  Last time I checked the toolbar went away, as well as the desktop, 
when I killed explorer.exe.

Ciao,
Dscho