Difference between gitcollector and borges

[bzz]

Hey, congrats on the first stable release!

I have a few question that may be documented somewhere and I just did not find it - sorry in advance! What is the difference between this tool and a borges CLI tool? Does both support the same use-cases? When one should be using one of another?

Thanks in advance!

[mcarmonaa]

Hi @bzz, thanks!

We are leaving behind rovers and borges to move to a new design that improves and fits better our needs, so you can see gitcollector as a first approach that we will reuse in the future for this new design and its implementation.

Also there was a need of this tool for https://github.com/src-d/sourced-ce.

gitcollector performs part of what rovers and borges do, for the moment in the same process. The command allows you to, given a list of github organizations, retrieve the information from the github api about the repositories they contain (rovers part) and download them (borges part).

For the downloading part it uses internally https://github.com/src-d/go-borges, our new abstraction layer to access and store repositories. As was done with borges, we are storing the repositories in siva files, but the concept of rooted repositories has changed a bit.

The main difference is that the old way we used siva and rooted repositories, a git repository could be split across different siva files. Now, we find a root commit for a repository and add the complete repository (not only the part of the history reachable from that root commit) to the rooted repository.

check out the old rooted-repository concept: https://github.com/src-d/borges/blob/master/docs/using-borges/key-concepts.md#rooted-repository

and the new one: https://github.com/src-d/gitcollector#storing-repositories-using-rooted-repositories

If you need to get repositories, I'd use gitcollector since other projects are already using the new siva+rooted-repos format (mainly gitbase) through go-borges. We are working to add compatibility for old sivas in go-borges src-d/go-borges#41, but keep in mind that is just for this transition period and it will be finally deprecated.