RubyForge now has Git support

08 Apr 2008

Folks using RubyForge have been requesting alternatives to CVS and Subversion for a while - there are feature requests in for Mercurial, Monotone, Darcs, and Git. Of those, Git seems to be the most popular at the moment, so thanks to Garry Dolley's excellent tutorial on Gitosis, RubyForge now supports Git as one of the SCM choices. Huzzah! Garry not only put up the tutorial, he also volunteered EBay4R as the first project to use Git and helped me work through the initial configuration. Thanks, Garry!

This Git support is still pretty new, so I'm not quite sure if we've got all the right things set up. But you should be able to start a project, select Git as the SCM, and push to and pull from a repository on RubyForge, and the Git repos are part of the nightly backup job. There are nine projects so far that have established Git repositories, so something must be working. Also, I've put up some notes in the RubyForge FAQ on getting started with a repository.

Dr. Nic Williams posted some helpful notes on using RubyForge Git repositories. He's also got some ideas on RubyForge supporting both Svn and Git for a project which are being discussed in a support ticket.

Another thing I'm thinking about is providing a sort of pseudo-SCM that lets you say "the source for this project is hosted on GitHub or Gitorious or some other place". Does anyone think that'd be useful?

Comments and suggestions are always welcome, and as they say on the Rails Envy podcast, let's git 'er done!