Dear gtk-gnutella developers, I'm sure that most of you are aware of the recent shutdown of all LimeWire LLC services due to a court order. Following this event, fear has arisen that other providers of Gnutella-related resources (especially those that are US-based) might also be forced (or simply choose) to withdraw their support for our community. This might also apply to SoureForge, where gtk-gnutella's Subversion server is hosted.
Now would be a good moment to migrate development away from Subversion to a distributed version control system (DVCS) to be prepared for such a move by SourceForge. In gtk-gnutalla's case, the best choice for such a DVCS would, in my opinion, certainly be Git. Many free software projects have moved to a DVCS in recent years for purely technical reasons. Performance, reliability and workflow of these systems are vastly superior to what can be achieved with CVS or SVN. The most important technical aspect that matters in our particular situation is that DVCS are completely independent of a central repository. You _can_ (and often do) use one because of convenience, but when the repository goes down unexpectedly, no history information is lost. You can then simply move on to another hosting service or switch to a completely distributed development model if you like. There are several different free DVCS to choose from, including Git, Mercurial, Bazaar, Darcs, Mono etc. My personal (biased) impression is that, as of today, the race is basically over. Both Git and Mercurial have won, being the two well-supported systems everyone is migrating to. If you only look at projects driven by people with a Unix-like background, Git seems to be the obvious choice. And that's for a reason. Git is very modular, very scriptable, very natural for people who know how to use a command line. It's also fast and efficient, being designed to handle massive code bases like the linux kernel. I have used Git for several months now, and it really works like a charm. There are good free hosting providers for Git repositories, most prominently http://github.com/. But, with a DVCS, you are not dependent on such a service. If they choose to close your account one day, you don't have to worry if your repository backups are up to date. More information about Git can be found here: http://git-scm.com/ Hauke ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Centralized Desktop Delivery: Dell and VMware Reference Architecture Simplifying enterprise desktop deployment and management using Dell EqualLogic storage and VMware View: A highly scalable, end-to-end client virtualization framework. Read more! http://p.sf.net/sfu/dell-eql-dev2dev _______________________________________________ gtk-gnutella-devel mailing list gtk-gnutella-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/gtk-gnutella-devel
