Chris Aniszczyk's (zx) diatribe

Next week at EclipseCon 2011, it will be a year after we first presented some rough Git tooling to the eclipse.org community via a tutorial. At the time, the deal was that the tooling was in early stages and needed some love from early adopters to help improve the situation. I’m happy that things have come quite a long way since last year based on Eclipse Marketplace stats and the community contributions the projects have received.

So what’s next? In terms of tooling, we’re getting closer to our 1.0 release (which is planned for the Indigo release). The git tooling at Eclipse is much better these days, if you need help or have questions, please start with the most excellent EGit User Guide. From our user guide, you should tell that we support the majority of the common work flows now. If something is missing, please let us know by filing bugs or contributing.

If you’re an eclipse.org project, please consider starting the process to move your project repository to Git. There are a lot of eclipse.org projects already on Git. You can find great documentation at Eclipsepedia on how to do the move. It’s not that bad, the LinuxTools project has recently migrated to Git and the CDT project has stated that they will start the process after the Indigo release. It would be nice to see the all of the eclipse.org projects have plans to move to Git by the Indigo release.

A portion of the EGit and JGit teams will be at EclipseCon 2011, so please swing by our tutorial and track us down if you have any issues moving to Git or using the tooling. We believe that the tooling is good enough now to meet the majority of eclipse.org committer needs. All of us want to see eclipse.org fully on Git by the end of the year, so let’s work together to make this happen. If people think holding a BOF about moving eclipse.org projects to Git is a good idea, let us know and we can do it.

The EGit and JGit teams are happy to announce the 0.11 release, just in time for Helios SR2!

You can grab the release from the Eclipse Marketplace or from our repository:

• http://download.eclipse.org/egit/updates

I’m happy to say we accomplished a lot for the 0.11 release which was mainly meant for improving some usability and performance issues (and of course, catching the Helios SR2 date). In JGit (new and noteworthy), additions were made to the porcelain API along with git-notes support. In EGit (new and noteworthy), we focused a lot on improving the performance so people should see improvements from the decoration of resources to the synchronize view. In terms of features, EGit now supports Mylyn integration via the commit dialog and history view. We also now support comparison of trees so you can easily compare projects and folders with the Compare with… action.

If you’re interested in helping us get to 1.0, please try out the code, file bugs and contribute if you have time. If you like what we do, consider starring EGit on the Eclipse Marketplace. We plan to iterate quickly so the next EGit and JGit release is planned for late April with a 1.0 for the Eclipse Indigo release in June.

The EGit and JGit teams are happy to announce the 0.10 release, just in time for the holidays!

You can grab the release from the Eclipse Marketplace or from our repository:

• http://download.eclipse.org/egit/updates

I’m happy to say we got a lot done for the 0.10 release. In JGit (new and noteworthy) we improved performance, improved the API and added HTTP basic and digest authentication which should help people behind firewalls. In EGit (new and noteworthy) we added a merge tool, UI for new JGit API (cherry-pick, notes, pull, rebase) and improves the Repositories view.

On the whole, it’s been a long journey since we brought EGit and JGit to eclipse.org earlier this year. Since our first release in early March, we’ve had over 1500 commits and added 5 new committers to the projects. The project has wide support from individual contributors and companies like Google, Red Hat, Tasktop and SAP. While we are still in beta and appreciate the patience of a variety of open source communities, we’re confident we can ship 1.0 in time for the Eclipse Indigo release in June 2011. Next up, we plan to ship 0.11 in late Feburary 2011 in time for the Helios SR1 release.

If you want to help us get to 0.11 and 1.0, please try out the tooling, file bugs and contribute code if you have the time.

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to present at the fOSSa conference in beautiful but chilly Grenbole, France…

It was an interesting conference as it was mostly researchers and academia in attendance. For my presentation, I talked a bit about the evolution of version control in open source and why there’s no going back from a distributed version control system…

The benefits of a distributed version control system like Git are pretty clear:

• Collaborate without a central authority
• Disconnected operations so you can work offline
• Easy branching and merging compared to existing approaches
• Define your own workflow to meet the needs of your team
• Powerful community sharing tools like GitHub
• Easier path to contributor to committer

Some people in the audience also asked why Eclipse chose to move to Git over some other version control system… I think the main reasons were:

• Git is the most popular DVCS and actively maintained  (this was a particular problem with CVS)
• EGit and JGit work together and are actively developed at Eclipse by a diverse set of committers (no repeat of having two SVN projects at Eclipse that didn’t want to work together)
• Git is fast and scales well
• Mature and popular community tools like GitHub and Gitorious

Anyways, thank you fOSSa organizers for a wonderful conference and hope to see you next year!

Today in scenic Ludwigsburg, Matthias Sohn and I gave a presentation at Eclipse Summit Europe 2010 on using Git in Eclipse.

As part of the presentation, we discussed what’s upcoming in the EGit/JGit 0.10 releases and demoed a new merge tool that is coming to EGit (from the latest nightly build). After demoing, we also discussed how the code review tool Gerrit works and how we effectively use it within our projects. Also, it was nice to see that 1/3 of the audience was using Git already either at work or for side projects.

If you want to help with the Git effort at Eclipse, please try our nightly builds, file bugs and contribute!

Next month I’ll be travelling in Europe and have the opportunity to present at Eclipse Day Paris.

I’ll be speaking about the move to Git at Eclipse, some of the challenges of moving to a new SCM and how to use Git effectively. In the end, I’m excited to meet members of the French Eclipse community and share some frosty beverages. I’d love to hear how Eclipse is being used in France.

Please attend the event and feel free to drop me a line if you want to meet!

Are you an Eclipse.org project lead or committer? Do you mind being an early adopter and want to help Eclipse.org fully move to Git?

If you want to help, consider moving your Eclipse.org project to Git. It’s not that hard, here’s how you do it:

• New projects may choose Git as their repository when they get bootstrapped
• Existing projects may migrate to Git from SVN/CVS.

If you want to see what other projects are using Git already, check out http://git.eclipse.org

I also recommend you start using the EGit tooling which we recently released the 0.9 version of. While the tooling isn’t perfect yet, we are getting closer to a more comfortable feature parity against the git CLI…

The best way to ensure the tooling meets your needs is to give it a spin and file any issues you come across. We’ll be releasing a new version of EGit and JGit towards the end of this year so this is your chance to get involved and help Eclipse.org move to Git. Thank you to the people who have already done this and are doing their part.

The EGit and JGit teams are proud to announce the availability of EGit and JGit 0.9 today. You can download via our p2 repository, Helios SR1 when it comes out or via the Eclipse Marketplace.

In terms of what’s new, on the EGit side, we added preliminary support for a synchronize view:

We also added some usability improvements to the history and repositories views. We also added a configuration editor to help manage your .gitconfig:

There were many other new things so I encourage to check out our new and noteworthy pages. On the JGit side we added a preliminary user guide, support for .gitignore, rename detection and a resolve merge strategy. On top of that, we refactored JGit to support non-filesystem based persistence which will enable JGit to run on the cloud (I’ll follow up in another post why this is important). If you’re interested in more information, please check out our release review slides as part of the Eclipse development process:

We’ll be releasing EGit and JGit 0.10 later this year to stay true to our relatively brief release schedule. The plan is to release 1.0 on time for the Indigo simultaneous release. Other than that, please enjoy the release and file any issues you come across. There are many ways to contribute, please check out our contributor guide for more information.

On a side note, if you want to show your support for the EGit and JGit teams, please consider on the Eclipse Marketplace.