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The Rise of Git
snydeq writes "InfoWorld takes a look at the rise of Git, the use of which has increased sixfold in the past three years. Buoyed in large part by interest among the Ruby community and younger developers, Git has been gaining share for open source development largely because of its distributed architecture, analysts note. And the version control system stands to gain further traction on Subversion in the years ahead, as Eclipse is making Git its preferred version control system, a move inspired by developers and members."
I had a small role in getting the PostgreSQL project to convert from CVS to git. There's a good summary of what happened at Lessons from PostgreSQL's Git transition. With a pretty conservative development community, the bar for converting from CVS to git was set pretty high: the entire CVS repository had to come through, such that every single release ever tagged could be checked out and get exactly the same files as checking it out of CVS (a little binary diff tool was used to confirm). With around 15 years of history in there, that took some upstream fixes to the cvs2git tool to finally accomplish; it took just over a year to work out all the details to everyone's satisfaction. My checked out copy of the current repo is 272MB right now, so neither small nor giant.
I would say that everyone who works regularly on the code is at least a little bit more productive than they used to be, with the older CVS experts having seen the least such improvement. But some people are a whole lot more productive. I'd put myself in that category--my patch contribution rate is way up now that it's so much easier to pop out a branch to hack on some small thing and then submit the result for review.
And the conversion seems to have improved the uptake of new developers getting involved in working on the code. Having to deal with CVS was a major drag for younger developers in particular, and Subversion is equally foreign to most of them now. As suggested in the article, anyone under 25 will only touch a corporate style CVS or Subversion repo if dragged kicking and screaming into it. As more of that generation rises through IT, old style repos will continue to get shredded at a good rate every year. It could have been any of the DVCS systems that ended up in this position, but git was the one that got the right balance of feature, innovation rate, and publicity. Now that it's got such a wide user base, too, I don't see any of the other VCS software options competing with it successfully in the near future.