The Git distributed source code management system has won over another major project, Perl 5. The Perl Foundation has announced that they have completed moving the source code of Perl 5 from Perforce (proprietary SCM in use by other projects including FreeBSD) to Git and are now opening the system up for developer use. Git is the open sourced source code control system created by Linus Torvalds to manage Linux development. The move to Git gives developers equal and easier access to the Perl source code and the distributed nature of git will allow developers to work on experimental changes to the language more easily.
Distributed version control is the way to go for all large projects imho. It gives everyone all the benefits of version control to maintain local patches on top of the mainline code. It’s ideal for developers that want to hack around once in while to fix something that’s been bugging them but otherwise don’t want to become a big developer with a commit bit.
FreeBSD recently moved to Subversion and I just don’t understand why they went through all the trouble of switching VCS and then didn’t get a distributed one.
If I recall correctly(so I could be wrong here), mainly because Git is a pet project of Linus Torvalds. There was also discussion of its long term viability and frothing on the reasons it was made in the first place.
At least FreeBSD didn’t goto all that trouble and switch CVS. Not that CVS is bad, just that IMO it isn’t exactly a step I’d take.
Rejecting Git because Linus Torvalds wrote it would be some seriously deficient thinking. Besides, this page: http://wiki.freebsd.org/GitConversion, shows that was serious work is or was being done to move Freebsd to a git repository.
Have a look at the CVS vs Git performance comparisons at the bottom of the page.