Thorbjoern Ravn Andersen wrote:
Ceki Gulcu skrev:
My question is then whether moving to git is worth the trouble and whether it will encourage contributions by making it easier for developers to contribute. From a strictly personal point of view, the fact that git works in disconnected mode is a killer feature.
Since you are the project leader, and the primary committer, I believe you should do whatever you think allows you to be more efficient while still allowing others to provide patches.
Although I find git's disconnected mode of operation valuable, I'm also risk-averse and afraid of new things. So I am looking for reasons to tip the balance in favor of git so as to overcome my fears. Facilitated collaboration would be an important justification in my mind. It appears that git encourages (by making very easy) project forks and to publicize the forked results. I can somehow imagine why this would encourage contributions but would also like to hear from others.
I agree with Robert that good tooling is essential.
Sun have chosen Mercurial due to its distributed feature so Netbeans will have good Mercurial support. Since git is written by Thorvalds who apparently do have zero interest in the Java community, I believe the tooling will be at best mediocre.
Git has attracted developers beyond Linus. So his disinterest in Java should not play a major role. As for Sun, they have not been very apt at collaborating with others outside Sun. While this may change in the future, Sun has surprisingly little influence in the tools that the average Java developer uses. The mere fact that people still talk about git speaks volumes about the quality of git because Linus is an awful advocate for git. The git presentation he gave at Google is embarrassingly inappropriate. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8
In my experience changing source repository platform is similar to changing operating system. Not something you do everyday.
Once a decade maybe. :-)
(and we still use CVS at work, since the benefits of good tools strongly overshadow the deficiencies of CVS ... for us!).
Interesting point. I guess a similar reasoning applies to migrating from log4j to logback. -- Ceki Gülcü Logback: The reliable, generic, fast and flexible logging framework for Java. http://logback.qos.ch