[cellml-discussion] Proof of concept: using git for specification development

[Andrew Miller]

Alan Garny wrote:
>> git is also a distributed version control system - the two tools have a
>> fairly similar conceptual model in terms of how they work, with a lot of
>> flow of ideas between the too tools. I have found git slightly faster
>> and a bit more extensible (and with a larger set of commands out-of-the
>> box), although one downside is that git front-ends are largely written
>> in shell-script, which means you Cygwin to use it on Windows.
>>     
>
> That's a big downside in my opinion. We cannot seriously expect some Windows
> users interested in CellML to install Cygwin only to be able to change the
> specifications.
>
> Is there really no 'simple' web interface that could be used and that is
> still 'acceptable'? If you want to get the community involved, you want
> something as 'simple' as plug-n-play, not something that involves tweaking
> things around.
>   
There are viewable web interfaces for git - see the gitweb at e.g.
http://repo.or.cz/w/cellml-draft-miller.git?a=tree;h=normative;hb=normative

Of course, whatever format we use we will also want a rendered version.

In terms of changes, users who don't do enough work on the specification 
to justify setting up a git environment can always propose changes to 
the mailing list. If they use git, it just makes it easier for us to 
share and merge their changes. I don't know how many major contributors 
to specification development we would have who wouldn't want to install 
Cygwin anyway - perhaps if there is anyone who this applies to on the 
list now is the time to speak up :).

There is an MingW / MSYS based git port as well - 
http://msysgit.googlecode.com/files/GitMe-0.4.2.exe - I haven't tried it 
myself.

We could use Mercurial - the only issue there is that the only free 
hosting I could find ( http://www.assembla.com ) looks like it is part 
of some company's business model and so I wouldn't want to rely on it 
remaining free - we don't really want to require people who want to set 
up their own repositories to rely on that.

Best regards,
Andrew