News

Atlassian Updates Git Management System

• By John K. Waters
• December 6, 2012

Atlassian released on Wednesday a new version of Stash, its behind-the-firewall Git repository management system for enterprise teams. Stash 2.0 adds collaboration features designed to address the challenge of administering a server for Git repositories for larger projects and larger teams.

Git, the open source version control system developed by Linus Torvalds for the Linux kernel, has been popular among developers, but adoption in the enterprise has been slower. Large corporate projects with many contributors, stakeholders, and code repositories have a lot of "moving parts," and many of the dev teams are geographically dispersed.

This release of Stash addresses the particular needs of enterprise dev teams who want to use Git with two new features: @mentions and Markdown support. The @mention component brings any team member into a code discussion instantly. It can be used in global or inline comments, and users receive e-mail notifications when they are mentioned. Code discussions take place inside Stash and are preserved and available for team members to view.

Stash's support for the Markdown markup language allows team members to provide "additional context" through formatted text, links, or code examples that can be added to discussions.

This release also supports branch permissions that allow dev teams to specify and manage code access control by both individuals and teams; all code developed separately on a branch can be tested and reviewed before being merged into source.

Atlassian, the Australian collaboration and development tool maker, best known for its JIRA bug tracker and its Confluence collaboration tool, introduced Stash last spring. The company developed the product in direct response to customer interest in Git, said Giancarlo Lionetti, Atlassian's group product marketing manager for dev tools.

"People like Git because it allows developers to branch off and work in isolation if they want to, and it supports easy integration of code into the larger project," Lionetti told ADTmag in an earlier interview. "The most common operations, like commits, happen on their local workstations instead of over the network, And Git just speeds up the development process among enterprise coders -- faster than [Apache] Subversion, so it's a top choice among open source and greenfield projects."

GitHub, the popular code-hosting Web site, "put a face on Git," Lionetti said.

"Our research strongly suggests that decentralized version control systems generally, and Git specifically, are supplanting the centralized systems that preceded them," said RedMonk analyst Stephen O'Grady in a statement. "Employers that wish to attract and retain technical talent would do well to acknowledge the market's preference for Git, as well as the technical advantages behind it, when selecting a VCS."

A 30-day trial download of Stash 2.0 is available now from the company Web site. Atlassian is offering an enterprise edition that includes 24/7 global enterprise support, membership to a global Stash enterprise user community and scale beyond 2,000 users in a single instance.