[Mono-dev] The new world of Git -- what else can we change :-)

[Avery Pennarun]

On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 12:03 AM, Jon Frisby <jfrisby at mrjoy.com> wrote:
> This isn't QUITE accurate.  Tags are intentionally harder to change precisely because they are intended to have a
> degree of 'permanence' and be outside of the day-to-day workflow that branches are for.

Right, but I don't think anyone is talking about changing these tags,
really.  (And you can still update them, it's just a manual process.)

> To that end, they include another important feature that branches do not, which is the ability to sign the tag
> when it's created, which gives you some assurance that the tag is from who it claims to be from (making
> trustworthy releases possible in a DVCS environment).

Yeah, in that case there's a little bit of GPG sugary wrapping on top
of the tag file.  But it's still nothing much more than a branch with
a GPG signature.

It still points at a particular commit id (sha1 hash).  It's just that
the pointer is GPG signed.

> So yes -- generally speaking all releases 'should' be tagged if you want to keep things git-ish.

That's optional of course; if you didn't need GPG before, you don't
suddenly need it now.  It is certainly the git way to do it, though.

> As for the question of branches, I've become fond of the idea of using an
> ad-hoc hierarchy of names starting with the name of the branch's 'owner'
> and with other namespaces for branches that are considered shared/important.
>  So I might have jfrisby/MonoTouch/MyTopicBranch, and whether or not I push
> it up to github.com/mono/mono.git is a function of how much value I perceive
> there to be in sharing it in that manner -- although I would almost certainly push
> it to github.com/jfrisby/mono.git regardless.

Hmm, if it's only a branch that you're working on - which is implied
by the jfrisby/ prefix - then I don't see any reason to put it in the
shared repo.  That's exactly why github has a jfrisby/mono repo.

If you expect *other* people to be pushing to jfrisby/* branches,
well, that's just crazy and perhaps you shouldn't be naming them with
your username like that :)

Have fun,

Avery