The cornerstone, I think, of a good April Fools Day joke is plausibility. The more reasonable or possible the topic, the more likely it is that you’ll fool somebody. I’m not sure what it says about the Eclipse Foundation that so many people really thought that we’d made a decision to move away from Git, but I am pretty proud that I caught a least a few people with today’s announcement.
In the aftermath, though, I should set a few things straight.
CVS is gone. Well, mostly gone. It is true that we’ve granted a open-ended stay of execution for Orbit on CVS, but all other CVS use has been completed turned off.
We’re very serious about Git. We are also very serious about Gerrit. This combination of technology provides a powerful means of attracting contribution that just can’t be touched by CVS or SVN.
Our entire committer base seems very happy with Git. The comments about confusing workflows, non-fast-forward merges, and missing commits are actually based in reality. But these are just growing pains that a few of our committers and projects have worked through. Real complaints are few and those that we do get are addressed pretty quickly. A great deal of credit goes to the EGit project for providing tools, as well as leadership and assistance in our migration to Git.
The chart is totally bogus. The Dash data tells a very different story:
This chart shows the number of commits that have different values in the “Author” and “Committer” fields. This chart does not provide an entirely accurate quantification of contribution (it excludes all contributions received via Gerrit, for example), but I do believe that the trend it displays is correct. I do have the necessary data to generate a more accurate chart, but–since Dash wasn’t designed with Git in mind–I don’t currently have it in a form that I can easily query. When this changes, I’ll publish a more accurate chart.
SVN support will end. Over the past 18 months, we have said “no” to projects requesting new SVN repositories. SVN support at Eclipse is effectively deprecated. We have not yet set an end-of-life date for SVN, but one will be set soon. Projects currently using SVN should start thinking about migration to Git.
