OSC Moving to Git
Git is a version control system that is all the rage in the open source community right now. Part of that is due to the fact that Linus Torvalds built it to help manage his work on the Linux kernel, and his project has a pretty good reputation for getting things done. It is now an independent project, and many people are using it get things done in their software projects in a collaborative way, or even independently but just in a more productive manner. You can find plenty of current blog posts about it.
Github is also "where it’s happenin’" in the OS community. They just launched their website as a subscription service, Rails moved over, and lots of developers are paying attention to the play-by-play action there and even playing their own part. Git makes it easy to participate (or at least easier).
I’ve been thinking a lot about how to use this excellent methodology in what we’re building here at OSC. How can any qualified member of the community contribute to the software we are using to run the team? How can I open it up to a degree where people can make an obvious difference, without expecting a developer uninterested in cycling to alter their project, or exposing our server to a bunch of hackers?
The answer is github. I will fork all projects that are used in running this site into my own repository, including Typo (this blogging engine), Rails itself, and any plug-ins we need. With Git, I can keep our branches current with changes to the main project while simultaneously incorporating your contributions. As long as there are no conflicts and the unit tests still pass, it should be easy to merge everything together. Well, at least you would think so listening to Linus talk about it.
So if you are willing and able, get up to speed on git. Clone the code out of my github repository and send me a pull request. Let’s get this thing rolling!
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