The Eclipse Git plugin project
I don’t seem to be able to blog much. Last year I did som hacking on Git, the version manager originally written to manage the Linux kernel source code. I’m quite happy with the export to CVS now. For more details, just browse the history of git. The reason I got into git was that I wanted something better than CVS, something that could work locallly, so I wouldn’t need to pollute the main repository with all my mistakes. Subversion was the obvious first thing to check out, but that didn’t fit the bill. It is server based, but does renames nicely. At the downside it’s slower, it crashed during conversion of the CVS repo (leaving a defunkt repo). Now CVS is reliable, something I’m not willing to give up. I’ve never had any sort of stability problem with CVS and few other people had. It is also fast enough to work very nicely over a GPRS connection. Clearcase.. well. No thanks. Bitkeeper was an option, but then I stumbled over Git and especially Stacked Git. It’s just awesome. As all good software it needs improvements. The “float” command is my contribution. It allows simple reordering of patches.
Then I wanted to use Stacked Git with Eclipse for (non open source) development. This works fine, but you have to use the command line as there is no fully functional plugin. Shawn Pearce, an very very active contributor to the Git project had started a plugin for Eclipse, called EGit. It wasn’t much use per se, but it had the basic infrastructure needed for me to solve the most apparent needs when developing in Eclipse, i.e. a history browser and quickdiff support. After bugging Shawn with some errors, which he fixed faster than most MTA bounce mail, I could develop those features which Shawn the pulled into Egit.
To the right of this entry are the first two screenshot I sent to Shawn (on IRC, I think). These aren’t entirely up to date, but not too much off either.
