[ruby-core:21046] Re: Happy new year and... moving Ruby development to Git?

Quoting Michael Klishin <[e-mail]>:

> Happy new year everyone.
> A question to Matz and all the Ruby contributors: are there any real
> reasons to use Subversion and not Git for Ruby development?
>
> I don't want to turn this into "centralized VCSs suck, distributed VCSs
> rock" kind of discussion, but seriously: many large open source
> projects moved to DVCS in last year or two (as large as OpenJDK,
> OpenSolaris, MySQL, Zope, Firefox, Perl 5), and some of them (Ruby on
> Rails is the most obvious example) have seen dramatically increased
> number of contributions from the outside of the "core team", because
> with DVCS, experimentation of all sorts is so much easier. Others that
> did not are considering a move and in process of evaluation of
> different options: FreeBSD and (again, I may be totally wrong) Emacs
> (leaning towards Bazaar?).
>
> A number of well known projects in the Ruby space use Git now: from
> Rails and Merb to RSpec to DataMapper to Rubinius to even Rake I
> believe (I may be wrong here). RubySpec uses Git, by the way.
>
> Recently series of patches by Brent Roman reminded me again how
> different the process of evaluating of different
> forks/experiments/patches with Subversion is. Yeah, download 7 files,
> apply them in order, with diff-mode in Emacs helps. I mean, it is not
> *really* hard but it wasn't a no brainer either. Pulling from a person
> who came up with something I may be interested in using Git (and GitHub
> obviously) is so much easier, that you start feeling the difference
> once you get used to DVCS process.
>
> Of course, there is git-svn and hg-svn and bzr-svn of all sorts, and
> they all work fine, but people seems to use what official repository
> uses. Probably because they don't want to bother converting their
> patches, or maybe because converters like git-svn look fragile to them,
> it does not matter much.
>
> What do you think? Is there a way for community to help with this
> transition, if you decide it makes sense?
>
> MK

I'm really not an expert on revision control systems, but just off the  
top of my head it seems like there are just too many of them, and  
there's bound to be some kind of "market shakeout", leaving a "Big  
Three". Right now, I'd guess that those three would be Subversion, Git  
and one other. I really don't know whether CVS will survive -- there  
are still quite a few projects using it, but I can't actually name  
one. And I don't know if Mercurial, Darcs, and Bzr have enough  
momentum to be worth thinking about.

My experiences with Git for my own small projects have been, shall we  
say, less than satisfactory after about six months, compared with  
about two years of Subversion and about ten years using ClearCase at  
my day job. But that's just a learning curve issue, I think. Clearly  
to be an open-source hacker, one *must* be Git-savvy, and all of my  
new projects are going to Github.

One other question for the community, though -- is there room for  
*another* version control system specific to the Ruby community,  
tailored to our unique needs?

--
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P), WOM

I've never met a happy clam. In fact, most of them were pretty steamed.