Zikula Blog

This article explains the reasons why, and to answer some common questions that arise from the move.

Firstly, GIT has dozens of advantages over subversion. I'll not get into the techie details, but safe to say, it's a dream to work with, saving time and making complex operations a 'piece of cake'. But there are many other reasons for the move beyond individual developer satisfaction. The big plus with GIT is that it opens up collaboration in ways that are just not possible in subversion.

I made a video about it: here (read more)

As you all know, one of the big changes has been to open up development (after setting in place strong QA processes) expanding the core developers from a closed circle to an open and collaborative team. Now we have a good strong team it's really time to take it to the next level and make it easy for others to submit their own features and bug fixes. Of course, people have always been able to contribute, but overall, they didn't for many reasons. The whole workflow is not easy over ticket trackers with code getting out of sync with the development branch or maintenance branch, or just being written for an old version which has changed considerably: people don't like being told to redo their work and devs don't like painful merges... Overall, the experience is not very friendly for the contributor, and not easy for the developer - but and it's all down to workflow - with a better way to manage, it could be easy and joyful!

This is where github.com comes in. It is a powerful collaborative platform with a strong social networking aspect to it's toolset that offer a pleasant workflow for contributors and developers alike. The result is we have now opened up development to everyone! Anyone can contribute without being a 'core developer' and we can still maintain our rock solid QA process. The process will be discussed in a future post.

So inevitably, people will now ask, "What about the Cozi (code.zikula.org)?" Github is great, but we're keeping our tracking tools at the Cozi projects. Commits at github are posted back to the Cozi by postcommit hooks which also updates the tickets. Overall, Trac provides a better ticketing system than Github so we're keeping that on the Cozi.

I've developed a whole suite of tools to migrate repositories over to Github (it's more involved than using the import tool at github) and have been using this toolset to migrate various modules the Core developers have been maintaining into one place at github.com/zikula-modules (work in progress).

You can find us at github.com/zikula