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Perl Migrates To the Git Version Control System
On Elpeleg writes "The Perl Foundation has announced they are switching their version control systems to git. According to the announcement, Perl 5 migration to git would allow the language development team to take advantage of git's extensive offline and distributed version support. Git is open source and readily available to all Perl developers. Among other advantages, the announcement notes that git simplifies commits, producing fewer administrative overheads for integrating contributions. Git's change analysis tools are also singled out for praise. The transformation from Perforce to git apparently took over a year. Sam Vilain of Catalyst IT 'spent more than a year building custom tools to transform 21 years of Perl history into the first ever unified repository of every single change to Perl.' The git repository incorporates historic snapshot releases and patch sets, which is frankly both cool and historically pleasing. Some of the patch sets were apparently recovered from old hard drives, notching up the geek satisfaction factor even more. Developers can download a copy of the current Perl 5 repository directly from the perl.org site, where the source is hosted."
I mean, really. Git's good -- git's even really good -- but what does it matter if Perl 6.x is gonna take longer than Duke Nukem Forever to come out? It's the clear and obvious winner of the OSS vaporware award. [And, yeah, I'm aware that there are beta releases -- or, at least, pre-releases -- but "where's the beef" already?] I'm not a big fan of ESR, but I have to admit "release early and release often" is something I happen to agree with.
$.02
There's more insight in a lolcat picture than there is in this comment.
I would guess it's ubiquity and featureset.
Git is built of a patchwork of C and scripts, meaning it's something Perl6 could be a part of someday, and it's also something that's going to be quite familiar to all Perl developers, not just the Pugs guys.
And, Git seems to be quickly becoming the Subversion of DVCS -- fast, open source, everyone has it, everyone knows it, and the alternatives really don't have much compelling to offer.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Fixed the subject line for you.
Last year, I completed two important Perl-based projects for my employer. I also use Perl at least once a week to run analyses of my Web server logs. I prototype Web applications in Perl and often just put the prototype into production because it works well. I'm still using Perl that I wrote over 10 years ago, with NO changes, on several OSs. And I use Ubuntu Debian, of which Perl is an integral component.
Perl is great. If I want what it doesn't have, I use a different language. But when I want regular expressions, CPAN, quick and secure CGI, analysis of large data sets and general parsing, easy database integration, and efficient portability from server all the way down to embedded systems, Perl is the first language I consider. Ruby might be ready for the real world one day. And Python is good for other things, but it is not a replacement for Perl.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
I am intrigued git and adoption by a major project like Perl is a big endorsement, so please don't take this as a rhetorical question: isn't centralization the heart of source code management? As a project lead, I'm reluctant to have repositories sprouting like mushrooms everywhere and everybody having their own little "trunk," and developers arguing who should have to merge with whom before each release. Is this reluctance totally unfounded, or easily solved administratively, or a valid concern with a peer-to-peer SCM model?
Other posters have gotten the main ones, but a few points you may have missed:
First, yes, you can use it in a centralized manner. It does that much better than Subversion does. For a taste, use git-svn -- crippled, but in many ways better than vanilla subversion.
To address your actual concerns, though:
I'm reluctant to have repositories sprouting like mushrooms everywhere and everybody having their own little "trunk,"
The fact that everyone has their own "repository" as a working copy doesn't mean there have to be "repositories sprouting like mushrooms". You can do that, and it works well -- see Github -- or you can just have one "canonical" repo that everyone pushes to, or both.
Or you can have other models -- I believe Linux is hierarchical, such that various subsystems each have their own maintainers, with their own subsystem-specific repository. Some large patches, like suspend2 or the Ubuntu patches, certainly maintain their own repositories. But it's actually quite easy to send relevant changes back up the chain -- Linus can pull from whichever of those he wants, and apply them to the official tree.
In fact, that's something much more difficult to do on Subversion -- having only one person with commit access would be stifling. On the other hand, with Git, commit access can be based on trust, not on productivity.
Just as an example: When I want to make a non-trivial change to a project on Github, I just fork it. Then, when I'm satisfied with my changes, I send a pull-request back. There's no question as to which is the "official" version -- on the other hand, if my change really is a good idea, and they refuse to merge, maybe I'll just keep developing on my own, merging in their changes, and before long people are seeing me as the "official" version.
and developers arguing who should have to merge with whom before each release.
But the problem of which version is official, and who needs to merge with whom, is a social, not a technical problem. You have the exact same problems with SVN, if you use it properly -- we tried this for a bit, with everyone working on their own branch. Merging was impossible, even though there was a "real" trunk. (Or, I should say: It was possible, but expect to wait a half hour or more for SVN 1.5 to figure it out -- or expect to spend a half hour or more of your own time giving SVN 1.4 the right revision ranges.)
Then we started using git-svn, everyone working off trunk, and keeping their own private Git branches locally. This way, merging was trivial, because Git is awesome at merging. The downside is, local Git commits get turned into git-svn commits when you send them to SVN, which changes the sha, which makes it that much harder to merge any other local branches you might have -- it was definitely an upgrade to start some new projects on pure Git.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!