How to avoid RCS and use git always?

[Richard Kimberly Heck]

On 12/17/20 4:59 PM, Richard Kimberly Heck wrote:
> On 12/17/20 4:45 PM, Richard Kimberly Heck wrote:
>> On 12/17/20 11:22 AM, Scott Kostyshak wrote:
>>> On Thu, Dec 17, 2020 at 12:15:17PM +0100, Matěj Cepl wrote:
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> I am trying to persuade my wife to start using VCS for her
>>>> documents, and avoid pressing her to use command line for it. I
>>>> thought that just by running git init in the directory her
>>>> documents are stored, LyX would understand that I want to use git
>>>> exclusively, but it still suggests RCS. I have to git add and git
>>>> commit the document to make LyX understand my preferences.
>>>>
>>>> Is there somewhere some option which would switch off RCS for her
>>>> forever?
>>>>
>>>> Best,
>>>>
>>>> Matěj
>>> Hi Matěj,
>>>
>>>  From what I understand, the reason that things are the way they are in
>>> LyX is that git was added "recently". I'm not sure about adding an
>>> option/preference. In general, we are hesitant to add preferences like
>>> this, and I believe you're the first one to ask for it.
>>>
>>> One possibility that *might* satisfy you would be to default to Git if
>>> RCS is not detected on the system. For example, on Linux if the command
>>> "ci" is not available and the command "git" is available, LyX could 
>>> just
>>> assume Git is intended and can do the setup. However, I'm not sure what
>>> I think of that and I'm not sure what other LyX developers think of
>>> that.
>>>
>>> Although I'm also a gitophile, in my opinion the biggest downside to
>>> choosing Git by default and to LyX doing "git init" is that Git can
>>> create lots of files (in its internal .git directory). I do not know if
>>> users would expect this and especially since using Dropbox is so 
>>> common,
>>> users might be surprised and confused (by Dropbox syncing) from the
>>> creation of so many files.
>>
>> We could at least give users the choice when choosing "Version 
>> Control> Register" of what to use. This could be as simple as a combo 
>> box, right?
>>
>> It would also be nice, I think, if we could detect if we're in a 
>> directory controlled by git and, if so, regsiter the file using git. 
>> This is as easy as checking the return value of 'git status'. With 
>> svn, I think 'svn log' will work. I don't know about other cases.
>
> OK, I see that this is supposed to work, but it doesn't work in all 
> cases. In particular, we look for .git/index, which will fail if we're 
> in a subdirectory (and presumably also for svn, which is handled the 
> same way). So that could be improved.

Obviously, we could just use the parent directory search thing. But is 
there a reason not just to check the return value of "git status" etc? I 
would think this was also an easier way to see if a file is under 
version control. But perhaps it is less portable. Pavel, you must have 
thought about this?

Riki