Recently the OpenEmbedded project has switched to the Git version control system. This is good news for many reasons. The obvious reasons are Git is faster than Monotone, handles branching better, has lots of nice features, larger user base, etc. Monotone has served us well, but as new tools become available, it is time to change. For those of us helping customers use OE for embedded projects, Git will make using OE much easier. Companies want to be able to track OE with minimal effort and typically maintain a few minor tweaks to OE. As most Embedded Linux projects now implement Git infrastructure for kernel development, the OE source tree can be maintained using the same infrastructure. Branching is very natural in Git, so it is fairly easy to create a OE “topic branch” and periodically merge with upstream changes as needed. The ability for easy repo hosting and branching allows OE users to lock down a version of OE for periods of project development, and still maintain a connection to the upstream OE repository for easily updating to new versions, or cherrypicking changes. So a big thank you to all who helped make this change happen.
Benefits of OpenEmbedded switching to Git
- by Cliff Brake