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  • Interchange source code migrated to Git

    Posted on May 25, 2009 by Jon Jensen

    Tomorrow will be the ninth anniversary of the date when Mike Heins created the Interchange CVS repository to track source code. Nine years!

    In coincidental honor of this anniversary I’m pleased to announce that the Interchange CVS repository has been imported into the Git distributed version control system (thanks to the excellent cvs2git program, part of cvs2svn), and we are now using Git to track changes and are retiring the CVS repository.

    Instructions on accessing the new repository directly with a Git client, using Gitweb, and using our GitHub mirror, are at the Interchange download page.

    There are many good Git tutorials online, and you can get started at the official Git website.

    I encourage serious Interchange users to check out GitHub. GitHub has become very popular and well-known in the larger Git community because it makes it easy for anyone to set up a free GitHub account, make a GitHub “fork” (personal working copy) of one of the Interchange repositories, and post changes there.

    Then instead of having to send patches through email where they may get mangled and are harder to merge with other changes, you can post them to your GitHub fork. Then one of the Interchange core committers can simply pull down the changes and commit them. Or if your change isn’t accepted for some reason, you’ve still got it in a public place where you can point other people to it, and you can continue to merge ongoing mainline Interchange development with your patch so it stays current.

    For other projects GitHub has helped enable broader community contributions beyond just the core committers, and I hope it can do the same with Interchange. But that will only happen if you take a few minutes to contribute back improvements you make to Interchange!

    You may also be interested in an artificially constructed repository of old MiniVend and Vend releases. That’s just for fun.

    Please report your experiences with the new Git repository on the interchange-users list.

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