RE: AreaDetector repository inconsistent

[Kevin Peterson <kmpeters@anl.gov>]

On Wed, 7 Feb 2018, Mark Rivers wrote:

> Ø  I like the certainty of using tar files of released versions in most cases, and explicitly deployed git clones in a beamline's local file tree if it's required. 
>
> I think “git checkout R3-4” is as certain as getting the R3-4 tar file.
>
> The advantage of the git clone is that you can immediately see if someone has changed a file with “git diff R3-4”.  If you have a tar file, and someone has changed
> a .template file, etc. you have no easy way tell.
The advantages and disadvantages of this depend on the deployment 
and maintenance strategy.
The BCDA currently uses subversion to track changes to most deployed 
modules, so being able to use git to see changes to deployed files 
provides little additional value.  If we didn't already have a system, 
this would be a useful feature, though I would create a local "deployed" 
branch rather than run from the master, to minimize damage from accidental 
pushes.
If only one person is deploying and maintaining EPICS modules, running 
from a github clone for every module isn't a problem.  If many people 
support EPICS modules and IOCs, the overhead of having to navigate to each 
EPICS module to type "git branch" to find out what versions of software an 
IOC is running is very painful and time consuming.
Kevin