Wednesday, October 21, 2009

git web

As you might know I also work on Linux machines from time to time and so I tried to set up a git server on a local machine. After two hours trying to set up gitweb I simply gave up (That costed me a lot of nerdpoints as casper pointed out correctly!). Today I invested another hour into gitweb until I finally came to the conclusion that whoever writes such a bad documentation, doesn't want any users. So I decided to search again for something else:
There are various pages where alternative projects are listed, and after having tried git-php which is either not accessible (probably a self hosted git server) or which doesn't work as well, I finally came across viewgit. ViewGit's claim is 'to be easy to set up and upgrade, light on dependencies, and comfortable to use.'. Which it really is. The point is not only that there exists a rather good documentation in the source code (as you would like to have it), there is a readable README which also tells you what to do and if you try to access it before it redirects you to the README. All in all this is what I wanted & needed - it took me less than 10 minutes to set up. Kudos to the developers.

This is what I expect from open source software. Why is the rest so crappy?

10 comments:

ComaWhite said...

I know gitorious offers the api as a download. which runs on ruby. I heard it's easy to set up. Try that ^_^

Anonymous said...

just use mercurial. everyone knows git sucks.

Anonymous said...

Don't use Mercurial. Everyone knowns it sucks.
;-)

Anonymous said...

I thought gitorious gives you automatic gitweb, it also solves lots of permission issues and automates the process nicely.

SaroEngels said...

@ComaWhite: that was a restriction I put up first: no ruby because I don't want to learn another scripting language to debug why it doesn't work.
@Anonymous1: mercurial could have been a choice but I wanted to learn git.
@Anonymous3: the story has not ended yet, lets see how good I can get the rest working

milliams said...

I've heard cgit is quite good. It certainly looks nice.

Unknown said...

Mercurial's documentation, especially the on-line documentation [hg help foo] is fantastic. Its developers are friendly and eager to help.
To open a web server for browser and pull access you type:
hg serve
and that is all.
Git really has no chance against Mercurial in terms of usability.

Anonymous said...

@maelcum I have used both git and mercurial, and mercurial has some somwehere shortcomings (no staging area, no proper local branches, sucki interactive add, needs a ton of plugins to be even semi-usable). As for "hg serve", "git instaweb" does the same.

Unknown said...

@esben: no staging area? see the patch queues plugin.
needs a ton of plugins: correct, but there are many plugins, included in the default distribution, sometimes offering more than git. For example, the pager plugin uses less and line breaking actually works. I don't know what git uses, but it requires horizontal scrolling to read long messages.
no proper local branches? depends on your definition of proper.

NotATrollIActuallyHelpedKDEFuckFOSSOnTheDesktop said...

Why does KDE on Windows have to be so crappy? There are a lot more Windows users than Linux users. It should be the first supported. YOLOTD(TM) 2010!