Time to Git Some Progress
Git has been growing in popularity, and I am particularly interested in its potential to reduce barriers to participating and contributing to Eclipse projects. There has been a vigorous conversation about using Git for Eclipse projects going on for some time over in bug 257706, including my own reservations about the idea. But it is clearly time to start making some progress on this topic.
In talking with Wayne, Denis and the committer reps on the Board of Directors, it seems that the most obvious place to start would be to have Git installed on our servers and providing a read-only cache of the work of all projects. The projects themselves will continue to use CVS and SVN. (see bug 280583)
I am personally willing to consider a future where Git becomes the standard SCM at eclipse.org, but time will tell if we can get there.
How can you help?
- Give us feedback on this idea, either in the comments here or in the bugs mentioned above.
- If you are involved in an Eclipse project and you would consider switching to Git, please start the conversation with your peers. Would someone be willing to start and maintain a list of willing projects somewhere?
- Get involved in the eGit project. The faster we have a first class team provider for Git, the faster we can use more Git at Eclipse. The CVS plug-in for Eclipse does truly rock, and there are lots of people at Eclipse who will not even consider switching if Git is not supported with equivalent function and stability
Life at Eclipse 
Jetty is interested in this, particularly coupled with something like Gerrit which would in theory make contributing to eclipse projects a veritable treat!
Jesse
July 16, 2009 at 2:17 pm
Good to see some progress on this, Mike. I think that providing git mirrors of the projects is a great start.
Oisin
July 16, 2009 at 2:47 pm
I was trying to help the eGit team with a problem running on Solaris Sparc. There may be something about the way eGit uses nio that triggers a bug in the JRE. I only have WinVista (where things are fine) and sparc to test on right now.
Certainly, once eGit is reliable, git has much to recommend it as an SCM for distributed projects. Having used technology ranging from SCCS to ClearCase, I strongly prefer git over CVS and SVN.
I’ve offered to work with the eGit team to isolate the problem on Solaris Sparc, but so far, they prefer to wait and see if Sun comes up with a fix on its own.
John
July 20, 2009 at 5:26 pm
The problem on SPARC (Solaris 10) was caused by a problem in the Sun JVM implementation which is fixed with the latest version, see http://code.google.com/p/egit/issues/detail?id=95
Matthias
September 11, 2009 at 11:59 am
Git on Windows is a bit of a second-class citizen. This might change … or not, given the Git developers are heavily centered around Linux.
Is this a problem? Is it acceptable for development on Eclipse to use a primary tool that is not as portable as the Eclipse IDE? Are Eclipse contributors that use Windows as their primary development environment less important?
The above was enough to shift my primary interest in DVCS to Mercurial. I work on both Windows and Linux, and most of the developers I work with use Windows as their primary development environment. I am not about to push tool that does not work as well on Windows (ports based on Cygnus have a tendency to expose Unix-isms that are not useful to Windows folk).
Added to this is an interesting future possibility: Mercurial running on Jython – if working – would allow building an integrated Mercurial client, running within same JVM as Eclipse, and using the *exact* same code as the standard command-line client. Not something that works today, but a possible future.
Preston L.
October 8, 2009 at 5:27 pm