Sunday, June 8, 2014

Git gui tools for mid-size repositories

I've been trying out different git gui tools.

Git itself, of course, comes with both gitk and the git gui, but there are a number of other tools as well.

Gitk works quite nicely on small repositories, such as the git repo itself.

I tried various git gui tools on a more substantial repository: a clone of the stable Linux kernel, which is certainly a sizable repository, clocking in at about 1.4 GB in disk space.

When I try to bring up gitk on the Linux kernel repo, it whirs and hums for several minutes, then eventually crashes with an error saying something like "unable to allocate 112 bytes".

As an experiment, I downloaded Atlassian's SourceTree tool. It looks like a beautiful tool, and indeed when I brought it up on the Linux kernel repo, it did not crash.

However, it was so slow as to be unusable; clicking on a menu item took 30 seconds to display the menu.

When I looked with Task Manager, SourceTree had allocated 7 GB of virtual memory and was still climbing.

7 GB of virtual memory? For a 1.4 GB repo?

Is the Linux kernel repo considered "too large to view", nowadays? Are there GUI tools that work with this repo?

Is it just that git tools don't work well on Windows?

If you know, drop me a line...

1 comment:

  1. We have been running gitblit on our central repository. It was so simple to install (on linux) that it might be worth trying it on a local repos even though it is a webapp.

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