[alsa-devel] HG vs GIT

[Mark Brown]

On Thu, Feb 07, 2008 at 05:10:27AM -0800, Trent Piepho wrote:
> On Thu, 7 Feb 2008, Takashi Iwai wrote:

> > Right, if you are a developer, it's fine (and even better).  But, my
> > concern is that the whole linux kernel tree might be too heavy for
> > some casual user who just wants to try the latest version of ALSA
> > driver...  "Download 50MB and use 350MB disk space just for a single
> > fix?  Hell, no!"

> You'll certainly get a lot fewer users of the latest driver code if they
> have to download, compile and install a entire new kernel.  There are
> plenty of people who will install new drivers, but won't even consider
> switching from the kernel their distro came with.

Judging from what I've seen on the IRC channels I hang around on I get
the impression that relatively few people doing this on a user level 
(typically people with shiny new laptops and so on) are using hg to
access the drivers - they mostly seem to be using either the snapshot or
release tarballs to update their existing kernels.  So long as those are
available in a similar form I would expect these users would be
unaffected.

> It would also be a huge PITA for developers who work on multiple
> sub-systems.  If I want to make a patch for an alsa driver, I have to
> reboot into an alsa kernel?  I try to go a few months between rebooting.

This use case is fairly well served by git - it is being used by enough
subsystems for people to be running into it a lot.  The support for
multiple remotes makes it relatively easy to have a git tree which works
with changes from multiple places and cherry-pick makes it relatively
straightforward to move changes between branches for submission.