Sorry for the late notice on this one, I got caught up in the fun
and excitement of EclipseCon.
We have two reviews ending on April 3/2013.
First is the release review for the Reviews for Eclipse
(R4E) project's 0.13 release [1].
Second up, is an interesting new project called "Eclipse Bundle
Recipes" (EBR) [2]. The EBR project provides template files
for creating bundles for open source JARs. Scoping the project to
templates rather than the resulting bundles facilitates bundle
creation for a wide variety of open source projects, not just those
with licenses acceptable to the Eclipse Foundation. Only templates
whose creation and use do not violate the license of the original
Jar will be permitted.
I had great hopes that the EBR project might provide a piece of the
solution for a change in how Orbit works. Orbit--as you probably
already know--was granted an exception when we migrated from CVS to
Git. That exception has so far been open ended, and we unfortunately
do no yet have anything that resembles a plan for migration. I had
hoped that a Maven-based solution driven by EBR scripts might
provide a solution. I'm not so sure that we need it any more.
While many projects have claimed success with Git, a great many
projects and developers continue to struggle with its adoption. In
the fall of 2012, several projects chose to terminate rather than
migrate their CVS repositories to Git. We have infrequent reports of
commits being erased and general confusion regarding the workflow.
While EGit does a good job of smoothing out the rough corners, it's
still the case that just writing code to a Git repository takes too
many steps. I hear many complaints about committers forgetting to
push their commits or having them lost in non-fast-forward merges.
This undercurrent of dissatisfaction came to a head last week at
EclipseCon. I was cornered by several committers who were quite
angry at having been forced to adopt Git and demanded that I allow
them to roll back to CVS. The general consensus was that while at
face value, Git appears to be better suited for encouraging
contribution, the confusing nature of its workflow was actually
having an opposite effect.
Data collected by Dash confirms it: many projects are actually
losing committers and contributors because of Git.
Non-committer contributions to projects has steadily dropped over
the last twelve months. Projects that switched to Git early in the
migration process did on average experience a short spike in
contributions in the last few months of 2011, but in the general
case, the contribution curve drops almost linearly from that period.
Faced with the backlash and drop in contribution, we have no choice.
After careful consideration, and extensive discussions with the
Eclipse Webmaster, we have decided that we have no choice but to migrate
back to CVS. Given resource constraints--the webmaster team
cannot support three version control systems--support for Git has
been deprecated effective today, April 1/2013. The Git server
will be shutdown on December 21/2013.
All Eclipse projects must include migration to either CVS or SVN
to their project plans, and include discussion of their
migration plan in all review documentation between now and the
cut-off date. As you migrate, please update your project metadata; I
have updated the "SCM Migration" page [4] to track the migration
progress.
Thanks for your attention in this matter,
Wayne
[1] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/attachment.cgi?id=229137
[2] http://eclipse.org/proposals/rt.ebr/
[3] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=349048#c37
[4] http://www.eclipse.org/projects/scmcountdown.php
|