I want to release a Java project as open-source, but i am unsure about the right platform and version control system.
There are three considerations to be thought of:
- Which version control software?
- Which project mangement library?
- Hosted or on my own server?
Version Control
Currently i am using SVN, and i planned to migrate to GIT. But there are also other possibilities like Mercurial or Bazaar. GIT and Mercurial seem to be very similar and i didn’t understand the pro’s and con’s of both yet. Also, i’d like to know if there are also any other good alternatives.
Project Management
Currently, i use Maven to manage the Java library dependencies and to carry out the releases. There are also other tools like Hudson or Apache Ivy and many others. They should be able to handle library dependencies and be able to include currently released versions. Deployment automation is also a plus.
To host or not to host?
Currently i use an own server to host my SVN code and Maven releases. There are so many hosted solutions out there, and i think one of them would be nice to make it easier for people to join my project if they are interested.
Some of the platforms i heard about or used are for example Github, Bitbucket, Google Code or Sourceforge. They should be able to easily integrate support for the selected version control and project management software. Additional stuff for developers like a bugtracker and a wiki are good too and need to be considered useful.
The best team
So, which combination would you recommend? I’d like to gather all information and create an overview so that people can decide for themselves which setup meets their needs at best.
Here’s what we’re using, and are pretty happy with:
The only gripe is that Github will limit what you can do with git. You’ll have to get used to the pull request mechanism.
On The Pull request limitations:
In git, you usually want to have a workflow where people commit to some sort of development branch, and then, after someone approves the changes, it gets merged into a stable branch. Any number of combinations and workflows are possible, and each likes his own.
The trouble is that, if you want to limit what branches people can commit to, you’d have to edit the update hook on github’s git repository. This is not possible in github (only post commit hooks are allowed). Github only allows all or nothing commit rights on the whole repository through the collaborator’s list, but does not allow branch specific permissions.
To work around that, collaborators would have to clone the repository with the stable branch into a development repo, and whenever they have something that’s ready to go into stable, they’d have to send a pull request. Following that, whoever controls the repository with the stable branch would pull from the “development repo”. In other words, you need to put some of the git branch functionality into branches. This means teams of developers can’t share a branch in a repo.
This limitation, however, is not too bad for a project with many individual contributors. It just gets a bit trickier when you have multiple contributing teams since they need to have a repository each.
But hey, also consider the visibility that having your project in github will provide, since that’s a big plus to attract developers!