This blog post is more or less a copy paste of the investigation and formulation work Assaf did for Buildr.
First, I’l take for given Eclipse is not moving away from CVS anytime soon. This post is not about replacing CVS for git.
In that context I still think git can help with Eclipse, and here is how:
git integrates well with CVS. You can clone a CVS repository, work in your git repository for some time, and commit back to CVS after a while.
We could easily imagine that some Eclipse committers would choose to use that development method for themselves. For example, you have a critical modification to do that would mess up the CVS trunk for a week. Your working copy may be a git repository over which you can branch as much as you want and that you can share with other committers.
Now, if you take a step back, you don’t have to keep that for committers only. You could even generalize that to contributors.
Here is what would be the process:
1. I am not happy about something, and I open a bug about it.
2. After some discussions, it becomes obvious there’ll be a need for a patch.
3. I fork the project into a git repository, and I make it publicly available to people.
4. I and others work on the patch.
5. The patch is ready and is attached back to the bug, and we do the IP legal work with the contributors.
Do you think Eclipse could offer a space for hosting git repositories ?
If you are interested into getting free hosting of git, look up github for example.
Your comments and reactions are most welcome.