It seems natural to me that the EGit project is doing their developing using Git itself.
With this in mind, the EGit project has created and is managing their own Git instance on one of our vservers at egit.eclipse.org. With this server, the EGit project is helping us at the Eclipse Foundation understand how the Eclipse Development Process (EDP) applies to development in Git. So far, we haven’t noticed much of anything that needs to change in the EDP, but we’re certainly open to that possibility should change be necessary.
We’re particularly concerned about the IP issues surrounding contributions. I’ve been watching the project fairly closely to make sure that I’m comfortable that the Eclipse IP Due Diligence Process is being observed; and it is. Kudos are are certainly due to project lead Shawn Pearce for his patience in dealing with the many questions that I’ve thrown his way (and the small book he wrote for me in e-mail form).
We’ve already asked the EGit team to make a few changes to the way they’re doing things. They’ve fronted their access to Git through Gerrit Code Review which, frankly, looks pretty cool. We asked for changes, for example, that ensure that non-committer contributors explicitly agree to the Eclipse Terms of Use when submitting contributions directly through Gerrit. I like how Gerrit works, am I’m grateful to the EGit team for providing us with a real, live, functioning instance that we can observe and learn from.
Given that the EGit team has been following the principles prescribed by the EDP, I’ve asked them to start producing and distributing a build of their bundles in order to attract more testers and contributors. I’ve been running a build that I created myself a few weeks ago, and it all seems pretty functional. Don’t go looking for a “Git” perspective at this point as there is none. Instead, look to “Import” a repository.
For now, only EGit gets to use this repository (sorry). Having this live repository is an important part of our migration to Git. Denis has created a number of bugs (all dependencies of “master” Bug 257706) to track the various activities that need to be undertaken to make Git a real first-class source code repository solution at Eclipse. You’ll notice that Bug 293192, “Quality team provider and tooling for Git”, is one of the blockers. The EGit team is working hard to meet this requirement. We, as always, invite your participation to make this real.
