Git support is on the way
When we started Beanstalk, our goal was to make version control simple and painless. A good development and design process starts out with proper source control, and to many, it was still a scary and complex task. In 2007, Subversion was the obvious choice from the standpoint of compatibility and ease of use as well as reaching a larger audience for our product. We’ve been growing rapidly ever since and its been amazing to see our vision come to life.
Git came along
While building Beanstalk, Git was starting to appear in the Rails community. As it goes with most new technology, Subversion was “perceived” as obsolete once Git was released. It’s always been our view that Git, in most cases, is not a real replacement for Subversion. Git is an extremely powerful version control system (we use it) compared to Subversion, but it confuses most people. In addition to the complexity, the availability of good clients and tools for Git is still lacking. If we want to maintain our vision of painless version control, Git would be a hard one to fit in.
A streamlined workflow
Our customers love Beanstalk because it is simple and easy to use. We work hard to reduce the learning curve of version control by having a good workflow within our application. We’ll introduce a better Git workflow to simplify the complexities while still allowing people to leverage the powerful features of Git. We’ll also make it easy to continue the development process.
Serving our customers
Supporting Git also helps us serve our customers better. We don’t think that Git is the “only” solution out there (that is ridiculous). We’ve learned that our customers want the option to choose the system that fits best for their particular project or team. So, that is exactly what we will do.
Stay tuned
We may be posting some screen shots of the process as we go. We want to give a glimpse into our design process and strategy. Along with Git support, we’ll also have the chance to improve the overall design workflow for Beanstalk, making it even easier to use and collaborate.
Comments
Nice to see this!
Any idea when this might be available?
Kyle: No confirmed date yet, but it’s already in progress and looking good.
That’s great news! As for Git’s complexity, as far as I understand most of it pertains to operations done locally, not the ones available via the web UIs like GitHub. By the way, are you actually going to implement the “social coding” features enabled by Git?
Looking forward to this. Will flip over once you gots the Gits
Mercurial support would be great too, we are Java developers and the GIT support in the IDEs is so poor that is just not user friendly.
I can haz private beta? Seriously, we’re looking to get away from Unfuddle, not terribly excited about Github, would love to see what you have. Congrats on the tools.rackspacecloud.com thing too.
GREAT! This would make beanstalk AWESOME. Can’t wait!
Sounds GREAT! I like Git but I lover Mercurial… Maybe you could add mercurial support too?
I know many dev shops are real enthused with Git.
As a flash developer I deal alot with binary files. This includes plenty of flas but also psds and pdfs as we always check those in as well.
It would be torture for anyone to wait for the 10 revisions of a 40 meg PSD to download.
Also there isn’t a good eclipse/flex builder plugin for git.
So.. Thanks for keeping the SVN service a priority, in some work flows it is much better than Git.
FANTASTIC NEWS!!! We would love to be the first to try it!
Cool – do you plan to add support for mercurial too?
Please make this a priority. Thank you.
I see your Dec 8th blog post on Time tracking for Basecamp Integration where you mention shifting your focus to feature enhancements like Git support (welcome news indeed).
We’re currently using beanstalk commercially and use git-svn for our Rails app so we can use git locally but put up to the larger company repository through svn but at the same time, we’re anxious to go pure git with beanstalk.
Any idea on an approximate eta for when git support will be a reality?
Thanks — Jeff
Hi Jeff,
We are wrapping up the first version now and should start inviting people late next week. We’ll start with a short list of paying accounts first.
Chris
Oh please invite me!
I’d rather not pay for another account just for GIT if I can just do it with you guys along with my SVN repos.