Are You Pondering What I'm Pondering?

One of the benefits of working on Chromium for linux is that we get to use all the standard linux development tools. For example, we’re using ccache and distcc to make our compiles faster.

Some of us are also using the git version control system to manage local changes to the source code. There’s a nice how-to page on using git to work on the Chromium svn repository (thanks Evan!).

This is the first time I’ve ever used git and I have to say, I’m very impressed by it’s speed. The source repository is quite large and running svn status can take over a minute on a cold disk or take a dozen seconds on a warm disk. git status takes takes only a few seconds on a cold disk or is instant on a warm disk. This in and of itself is a good reason to use git.

The ability to quickly jump around between branches is also convenient in conjunction with ccache. Switching to a new branch and re-building normally only takes a couple minutes, making exploratory changes very very light weight. I used to maintain multiple svn checkouts, but this is much less time consuming.