[ruby-core:21039] Happy new year and... moving Ruby development to Git?
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