Emacs’s switch to Git

Emacs has finally switched to Git, after ten months of fixing 29 years of accumulated source control cruft.

By Mickey Petersen

After nearly ten months of hard work, Eric S Raymond (esr) has finished the transition from Bazaar to Git, and in the process cleaned up 29 years of ossified CVS references and other source control flotsam. ESR calls it “geologic strata” and he’s not even kidding. 29 years of continued development makes it unavoidable. If you haven’t been keeping up I suggest you read his article on the conversion.

The move to Git, I think, is a big one. Like it or not, but it won the source control fight. Bazaar lost (not that it ever had a chance of winning); Mercurial lost too (and it did have a chance of winning.) Git’s the right choice; it will significantly reduce the barrier to entry for new developers — well, you still need to sign over your code to the FSF, but it’s easier.

Lars Ingebrigtsen has written a great tutorial for newcomers interested in contributing to Emacs. I had no idea it was that easy to find and push bug fixes out. There’s a fancy Emacs package, debbugs, that makes it easy to do so (obviously.)

I hope the switch to git will renew interest in committing to Emacs.

Eric's work on this is pretty amazing, but it certainly doesn't mark the point when git users can finally contribute to Emacs -- that's been possible for absolutely ages, due to the existing git mirror of the bzr repository.

Eric's work represents a massive clean-up of the entire development log, so of course the new git repository is different to the old git (and bzr) repo; but so long as you had *a* repository for Emacs, you could easy contribute patches.

That said, hopefully the publicity around the change will indeed encourage new developers to get involved (even if there was no particular reason why they couldn't have been involved already).

— Phil · reply

Emacs 28 Edition is out now!

Emacs’s switch to Git

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