Yesterday, Shawn Pearce (Google), Robin Rosenberg (Dewire) and Matthias Sohn (SAP) and I gave a talk at Eclipse about Understanding and Using Git at Eclipse.
I believe the tutorial was well received. Our goal was to introduce people to Git, JGit and EGit. We also talked about why Eclipse is moving to Git in the future. I believe we accomplished that on top of the message that there’s no free lunch to moving to Git at Eclipse. Heck, I don’t only want Eclipse to move to Git, I want other open source projects to do it. The license of JGit is liberal enough that other projects like Netbeans can embed it. Git simply empowers contributors in a way that’s not possible with centralized version control systems.
It will take time to get the tooling right and understand how much a distributed version control system like Git is the perfect fit for Eclipse. On top of that, we explained how the EGit and JGit projects leverage Gerrit to facilitate contributions and code reviews.
It’s my hope by the next Eclipse simultaneous release, we have a good amount of projects moved to Git and the tooling is top notch. The only way this will happen is if we admit to ourselves there’s no free lunch and provide feedback. I’m already impressed with what happened after the tutorial… we have people filing bugs and providing patches. This is what open source is all about.
If you still don’t get it, watch Linus’ tech talk about Git and read the Pro Git book.