Fedora has managed its source control with CVS from its birth but is now deciding to switch over to GIT. This decision was made at the FUDCon this week, at Toronto. RedHat’s Jesse Keating has decided to make this switchover from CVS. He writes in his blog:

Git has skyrocketed in popularity over the past few years. More than I ever imagined, when I first toyed with the idea of doing the jump to git, back in the Fedora Core 6 days. Most notably the Gnome project has recently made the leap from SVN over to git (amusingly they started in CVS, we’ll just be skipping that SVN step). Not only is git popular, it’s really a better choice.

GIT also offers much better features like:

• Better patch management system giving an easy way to deal with modifications and changes in the source.
• Better distribution management allowing users to use GIT repositories even though they are using different distribution versions.

The simplest reason to use GIT though, would be because it is faster than CVS. Also, GIT allows many upstream hosted projects making it publicly available as a development package platform. The switchover will go into implementation shortly after the release of Fedora 13 but could be delayed till Fedora 14. But either way, we will see a GIT repository control in Fedora by 2010.