From: Joshua Ballanco <jballanc@...>
Date: 2009-10-13T07:54:28+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby trunk

On Oct 12, 2009, at 2:00 PM, Jonas Schneider wrote:

> Hey guys,
>
> I have a question: why is the official ruby repo still on SVN and not
> on Git?
> I think git provides much better collaborative options. What about
> just putting on GitHub so everyone can fork from there etc., and git
> has proven better in about everything ruby-related, so why not Ruby
> itself?

There was a very long discussion about this over on the ruby-core  
mailing list not too long ago (http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-core/25290 
). Essentially, the decision not to move was made because:

-- core team is busy fixing issues and doesn't need the cognitive load  
of learning a new VCS

-- certain Subversion specific tools used by the core team would need  
to be rewritten

-- enough of the core team is still on Windows and git support on  
Windows is still shaky enough that these members don't feel  
comfortable with the move

-- While Git has advantages over Subversion (distributed, easy  
branching), they aren't great enough to overcome the above hurdles.

-- The git-svn bridge has progressed significantly enough to make it  
mostly irrelevant whether the "true" central repository is Git or  
Subversion.

-- The git mirror at http://github.com/shyouhei/ruby is sufficient  
(try it, you'll like it!)

-- As described at http://wiki.github.com/shyouhei/ruby/noncommitterhowto 
, it really doesn't matter anyway if you're not a committer, because  
you'd have to get any patches approved and submitted by a committer  
regardless. Whether that's a git-pull request or a git-format-patch e- 
mail shouldn't really matter.

Finally, as much as I like the easy forking that git and GitHub allow,  
perhaps try looking at the numerous Ruby forks that already exist  
(some of which *do* use git as their central repository) and maybe  
contribute to one of them instead of making your own fork:

Rubinius: http://github.com/evanphx/rubinius
JRuby: http://github.com/jruby/jruby
MacRuby: http://www.macruby.org/source.html
IronRuby: http://www.ironruby.net/

Cheers,

Josh