A few years ago Samuel wrote a blog post entitled “So, when is Alfresco moving to GitHub?” In it he presented a number of reasons why it was difficult to move our code from SVN to Git. Given the recent move of Share to GitHub, I thought it would be worth writing an update on the situation.
The vast majority of our production code is now in Git. ACS Repository, Activiti, Search Services, Records Management, Google Docs Module, Android App, iOS App, Share, ADF Components, … and that’s not including our enterprise code which is primarily within our hosted GitLab.
Some of this code has always been in Git, but much of it has been migrated from SVN. I migrated the Records Management codebase in 2015, and since then we’ve had a fairly continuous stream of migrations.* The obvious question is "What’s changed since Samuel’s post?"
The answer is that not very much has changed. The team decided not to leave older releases in SVN for exactly the reasons mentioned by Samuel. Cherry-picking changes from SVN to Git can be done with svn diff --git and git apply, but it’s a pain, and we make a lot of service pack changes in our products. The ACS repository codebase is large and although we’ve split out several modules into smaller Git repositories, there is still over 2Gb of history in the Git repo.
The primary reason for migrating to Git is the popularity - Git is seven times more popular than any other version control system. Some of the reasons for this are Git’s local and lightweight branches (leading to cleaner workflows), faster access to history (since it’s all stored locally) and smaller overall repository size (leading to faster access to remote commits). Some other reasons are historical – SVN has greatly improved its merging and has got rid of the need for a .svn directory per folder. However since GitHub is the most popular and largest open source host in the world we want to use Git to make it easy for users to access our code.
* We’ve had migrations in the past too, e.g. Share extras in 2012, but the last year has seen a concerted effort to migrate projects.
