Hey guys,
I have a question: why is the official ruby repo still on SVN and not
on Git?
I think git provides much better collaborative options. What about
just putting on GitHub so everyone can fork from there etc., and git
has proven better in about everything ruby-related, so why not Ruby
itself?
There was a very long discussion about this over on the ruby-core
mailing list not too long ago (
http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-core/25290
). Essentially, the decision not to move was made because:
-- core team is busy fixing issues and doesn't need the cognitive load
of learning a new VCS
-- certain Subversion specific tools used by the core team would need
to be rewritten
-- enough of the core team is still on Windows and git support on
Windows is still shaky enough that these members don't feel
comfortable with the move
-- While Git has advantages over Subversion (distributed, easy
branching), they aren't great enough to overcome the above hurdles.
-- The git-svn bridge has progressed significantly enough to make it
mostly irrelevant whether the "true" central repository is Git or
Subversion.
-- The git mirror at
http://github.com/shyouhei/ruby is sufficient
(try it, you'll like it!)
-- As described at
http://wiki.github.com/shyouhei/ruby/noncommitterhowto
, it really doesn't matter anyway if you're not a committer, because
you'd have to get any patches approved and submitted by a committer
regardless. Whether that's a git-pull request or a git-format-patch e-
mail shouldn't really matter.
Finally, as much as I like the easy forking that git and GitHub allow,
perhaps try looking at the numerous Ruby forks that already exist
(some of which *do* use git as their central repository) and maybe
contribute to one of them instead of making your own fork:
Rubinius:
http://github.com/evanphx/rubinius
JRuby:
http://github.com/jruby/jruby
MacRuby:
http://www.macruby.org/source.html
IronRuby:
http://www.ironruby.net/
Cheers,
Josh
