Git at Eclipse

September 22, 2009 | 2 min Read

Git has been gaining some traction in the Eclipse community as of late.

From the birth of the EGit project at Eclipse and the recent approval of JGit to be hosted at Eclipse as a sub project of the EGit project, good things are coming. Why should you care about Git?

Git is pretty popular these days as evident by some of the open source projects out there using Git:

  • Linux
  • KDE
  • Qt
  • Android
  • X.org
  • Wine
  • VLC
  • OLPC
  • OpenAFS
  • Ruby
  • Perl

Apache is even rumored to be switching, at the moment they have a public GIT mirror.

Git is also fast and efficient. In some of my testing, Git produced significantly smaller repositories than SVN did. In terms of speed… I think Git’s ability to do branching cheaply is one of its biggest assets. In the end, I think the most important feature of Git is that it significantly lowers the barrier to contribution. People are able to easily branch your work and you can pull at a later time. I’m not a Git expert by any means yet, but here are some things that have helped me along my Git journey:

In the Eclipse world, I see a move towards Git as the smart thing to do. It would make it easier for the Eclipse community to contribute code versus our current model. It would also help the many companies out there that maintain their own copies of Eclipse and patch things as necessary because of their release cycles. The more I look at it, I can’t come up with many reasons why Eclipse shouldn’t move to Git. Here are some current happenings:

  • A vserver is being provisioned with Git and Gerrit installed
  • A read only GIT mirror of the Eclipse codebase is being setup

If Git is important to you at Eclipse, I encourage you to get involved with the EGit project via their mailing list.