I have taken an interest in git and would like to use it for work. But work means java and eclipse and convincing colleagues of the advantages in the face of some disadvantages. One of the current disadvantages is the lack of a finished Eclipse plugin for git. I have played with egit and like the way it can already be used even though you have to fall back to other clients for some things. However, my colleagues were not impressed.
That's where the itching started. I have 3 of the Addison-Wesley eclipse series books on my bookshelf, but I have never coded a real plugin. So this could be my niche...
But wait, am I not supposed to help develop egit then? It could sure use the help.
Good question. My current answer is that I don't like one of their design goals: to be 100% pure java. Looking through the wiki it seems that work on some features is waiting for features in the core jgit library to be done first. My personal design goal is quite the opposite: reuse as much of git-core as possible. One thing that attracted me to git was the modular implementation, with user-friendly commands sometimes implemented as perl or shell-scripts that make use of lower-level C programs. As for the 100% java goal itself: it has never done anything for me. GNU is my platform, developers with their workstations my audience. Git-core is just an apt-get install or port install away.
So, what's the current status and what are the first features you can look forward to?
- Share project... shows my plugin as Git (smop) to differentiate it from egit
- The sharing icon is cooler (I took the CVS one and made it say GIT)
- Graphical status emblems will be the first feature I am going to work on, followed by
- a simple commit right-click menu item
Of course, the chance that I can keep focussed long enough to really deliver something useful is not that high. Be that as it may, I'm having fun programming again!
