When Linus Torvalds used to talk about world domination, I thought it was relating to Linux. Apparently, it applies to his side-project Git, too. Developer demand has nudged Microsoft’s CodePlex into supporting Git.
Most of the major open source code hosting services had already added support for Git. SourceForge, Google Code, GNU Savannah, and (obviously) GitHub have all offered support for Git repos. Yesterday, CodePlex’s Mark Groves announced that CodePlex was bowing to developer demand and followed suit.
“So why Git? CodePlex already has Mercurial for distributed version control and TFS (which also supports subversion clients) for centralized version control,” wrote Groves. “The short answer is that the CodePlex community voted, loud and clear, that Git support was critical. Additionally, we just like it, we use Git on our team every day and making the DVCS workflows more available to the CodePlex community is just the right thing to do.”
Documentation for using Git on CodePlex is available for new projects, and existing projects can contact CodePlex support to migrate to Git.
Will Git Make CodePlex More Popular?
Right now, CodePlex has a bit more than 28,000 projects hosted on the site. GitHub has about 100 times the number of repositories, while Google Code claimed about ten times that many in 2009. SourceForge is reported to have more than 400,000. (Updated)
That’s not to say that Git is the sole defining feature that makes or breaks a code hosting service. But Git does seem to be the de facto standard for many developers.
Wonder if there’s any chance Microsoft will bundle in support for Git in Visual Studio now?
