January 31, 2012, 8:03 AM — Developer tool provider AccuRev will release a package designed to help enterprises incorporate the increasingly popular Git open source version-control software into their development operations, the company announced Tuesday.
"We're seeing tremendous excitement in our customer base over Git," said Cliff Utstein, AccuRev's vice president of marketing. "That said, Git does have some challenges in the enterprise, around things like security, compliance and scalability."
AccuRev's Kando package, due next month, will complement Git with additional enterprise-friendly capabilities, such as workflow, issue tracking and integration with Microsoft Active Directory and user authentication systems based on LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol).
Kando will work in conjunction with AccuRev's SCM (software configuration management) software, called AccuRev SCM.
Linux creator Linus Torvalds, along with a number of other developers, created Git in 2005, after becoming increasingly frustrated with other source control systems, such as BitKeeper, Subversion and CVS. Torvalds concentrated on making a highly efficient distributed system, one that can quickly merge new changes from many contributors into a large codebase.
Today, Git is one of the most widely used open source source-control systems, and manages the code for such large projects as Linux, Android, Perl, Ruby on Rails, Eclipse, Gnome and the Debian Linux distribution. Git is being increasingly used within larger organizations too, thanks to its low cost and popularity among developers, noted Gartner analyst David Norton. Larger organizations, however, face the challenge of working Git into larger management processes for software development, which is where a package such as AccuRev's can help.
Under Kando, developers would work directly in Git. Changes, however would be pushed to a back-end AccuRev server, where issue tracking, change management, testing and other features can be applied.
With Kando, organizations can audit and trace develop activity within Git, which can be useful for compliance and organizational policies. All changes made within Git are captured by the AccuRev server, and no changes can be undone, providing an audit trail. AccuRev also allows developers to work on different parts of the same file at the same time, so multiple issues can be addressed simultaneously.
Kando will also help in user authentication. Through a graphical interface, administrators can create ACLs (Access Control Lists) that limit access for developers to just the part of the project they are working on. It can use the organization's own LDAP directory, eliminating the need to set up a separate list of users.
To operate, Kando runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and requires the Java 1.6 and AccuRev 5.4 to operate. The package comes with a copy of Git, or the organization can install their own copy, version 1.7.4.1 or newer.
AccuRev plans to release Kando in March, though a beta is available now. The company has not decided yet on how to price the product.
Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Joab on Twitter at @Joab_Jackson. Joab's e-mail address is Joab_Jackson@idg.com
