Well, December 21st is here and the the apocalypse didn’t happen! But it’s still a big day at Eclipse because today at 12:00 noon, Eastern Time, our webmaster team of Denis and Matt started the process of turning CVS into a read-only service. At this point, we are down to only a handful of projects which still have a CVS repository, and we have hit the long-published deadline.
This is a journey that the entire Eclipse community has been on for at least two years. I have to admit that when I first heard of the idea that we should move the Eclipse community from CVS to git, I was adamantly against the idea. The notion seemed to big, too scary, and the idea that we could get the community to move seemed too unlikely. But as time went by the logic and benefits of moving to git started to clearly make sense. The trend towards social coding is huge. Working with the developer community which has grown up around github is large and vibrant. It is critically important to all open source organizations to make it as easy as possible to attract more contributors, and leveraging git is a big part of making that happen.
There are a lot of people that worked hard to make this happen. In no particular order:
- Chris Aniszczyk, who is an elected Committer Rep on Eclipse’s Board pushed hard to make this possible. Not only did he tirelessly champion this transition at the Board, he worked hard on EGit and JGit to get the tools in place to make it possible. For anyone who wonders about how important your elected representatives are on the Eclipse Board, Chris is a great example of how influential these directors are. Chris blogged about the transition today as well.
- Shawn Pearce, and the entire EGit and JGit teams. Shawn started those projects and helped bring them to the Eclipse Foundation. When we started this process, one of the biggest impediments was the lack of great tools. Shawn, Chris, Matthias, Remy, and many others have worked extremely hard to get these great tools in place. Given how mature and feature-rich the CVS Team Provider was, they had a lot to accomplish and not a lot of time to do it in.
- Wayne Beaton has done a great job in tracking down all of the Eclipse projects and coaching them on what they needed to do to transition their projects to Eclipse. It has been a huge job to get 180+ projects moved, and Wayne has done an enormous job in ensuring that each and every project knew about the transition, and helped them get it done.
- The Eclipse webmaster team of Denis Roy and Matt Ward helped migrate all of the repositories over, and basically made this all possible. I can’t even imagine how many repositories they’ve created for the projects over the past year or so.
- And finally, all of the Eclipse projects deserve a big round of applause. It has been a big job to move to git, involving learning new tools, deciding on a repository architecture, re-doing their builds and so one. In particular, I want to thank some of the older and larger projects such as Eclipse, Web Tools and BIRT who had years of working practices that they’ve had to re-do to make this all possible. In particular, John Arthorne and Paul Webster really helped by elaborating some best practices, and establishing some solid git usage policies that have been widely adopted by the community as we’ve transitioned.
So thanks and congratulations all the way around. It’s been a big job, but we collectively got ‘er done!
