[Openmcl-devel] Looking for a git guru

[Ron Garret]

I'm working on integrating a revision control system into the IDE.  It's evolving into a pretty hairy project because of some of the unique features of Lisp programming.  In particular, the same file or sets of files are often used by multiple projects.  The canonical example of this is that everyone has their own little private utilities library.  There are also packages like PPCRE that are not really useful on their own, but are used as components of larger projects.  This is actually a problem in other languages as well, but it's particularly acute in Lisp.  Because it is so easy to make changes to running code, programmers tend to make changes to libraries more often than they do in, say, C, where making a change to a library is a significant chore.

To really support this kind of coding I'm trying to build a system that tracks revisions of files and projects separately.  In order to avoid re-inventing the wheel, I'm using git as a back-end.  Git seems to be infinitely malleable, and as far as I can tell what I want to do should be possible as a thin layer on top of git.  The basic plan is to have a git repository with multiple roots, one for each file, and one for each project.  As you code, every time you save a file it updates a commit chain that contains only that file.  Then when you have something working, you update the project commit chains that use those files to point to the new version (after running regression tests of course).

At least, that's the plan.

I'm a relative newcomer to git.  I've been doing a fair amount of reading on it, but I've never really used it for serious development.  So it would be helpful for me to have someone who really knows git to serve as an advisor/mentor/collaborator on this.  I just want to be able to bounce the odd question off of your every now and then.  Any volunteers?

Thanks,
rg