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I'm developing with Eclipse and managing my repositories with git and gitorious. Until now, I used git on the command line. I've looked around for a way to integrate git into Eclipse and found EGit. This has also been asked on SO two years ago. But as EGit uses JGit, a git clone written in Java, I'm concerned about its compatibility with the original git.

I know that EGit is missing some (maybe a lot) of git's advanced features, so I would use EGit for daily basic uses like commits, checkouts, pulls and pushes, branching, etc, and use git for more advanced - but less frequent - tasks. Any experiences? I won't use EGit if there is any chance that my repos get broken just because git and EGit didn't agree on how to manage them!

Another question: Are there alternatives to EGit? I couldn't find any.

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craesh
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2 Answers2

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As one of the developers of EGit and JGit, all I can say is that the projects are still in beta (incubation in eclipse.org terms). We are evolving quickly and have managed to pump out a release every 3 months for the past year. We recently shipped 0.10.1 and are planning to push a 0.11 release at the end of February. Our goal is to ship a 1.0 for the major Eclipse Indigo release in June which would be usable by the whole Eclipse community. This is required because eclipse.org itself is moving to Git.

One of the best things you can do with EGit is to checkout the user guide which aims to help people use EGit in the way it was intended, See Eclipse Wiki

If you have any questions, you can always use our mailing list or bugzilla. More information can be found in our extensive contributor guide.

On a side note, SmartGit under the covers uses JGit to handle the operations. Gerrit the popular code review tool (used by the Android dev team and others) uses JGit under the covers too. JGit has ~1800 tests to ensure compatibility with Git and even has some developers that work on CGit too. In the beginning we had a bit of trouble with compatibility but that is no longer the case with our extensive test suite. The project has developers from SAP, Google, Red Hat and other companies.

David Robinson
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Chris Aniszczyk
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  • Ok, 1800 tests convince me :) – craesh Jan 10 '11 at 11:22
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    Pardon me, but it seems futile to re-implement every software project in Java. – cmcginty Jan 12 '11 at 00:18
  • @Casey The main problem with this re-implementation is that it is impossible to guarantee that the bugs in JGit will *always* be compatible with the bugs in git. So, if you are alternating between command line and Eclipse (as I do), you are essentially asking for a disaster to happen (which defeats the at least one purpose of version control). – Android Eve Jul 11 '11 at 18:01
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    I echo what Casey stated, implementing Git in Java was a mistake - should have done a command wrapper - it is buggy. – Daniel Sokolowski May 28 '14 at 14:30
  • EGit is no longer compatible with Github as of this spring from Windows boxes. I can't find where to submit a bug report, I can't find any useful information, and debugging information is practically non-existent. While I certainly appreciate the efforts of the community to truly embed a team provider into Eclipse for Git, I have to say that it's been frustrating to use and has only gotten worse since Github made some change making EGit incompatible, at least for me. (Bitbucket repos still work.) – Brad Jul 21 '14 at 17:27
  • I don't know if EGit is still being developed, but I'm adding this strong criticism with sincerity and only to be helpful: I'm currently attempting to configure Eclipse to use EGit + Github on a Mac and it has been a horrible and at times extremely perplexing experience. There is very little quickstart documentation. There also seem to be several core needs that are not explained like configuring Git at the project level and preferences level, changing user/system/repo locations...it's just not implemented well. – Digital Impermanence Dec 04 '16 at 01:18
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I know you are looking for a way to integrate into Eclipse, but in my experience trying to do this does not work. Even if EGit is perfectly compatible with your Git repo's it is still buggy as hell. I use NetBeans now which has Mercurial built in and optional Git plugins, they are still useless!

If you want a nice visual way to work with Git then try SmartGit or Tower. I have used both a little and heard great things about them, but mainly stick to CLI + GitX.

Phil Sturgeon
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