HOLLAND, MI: The Perl Foundation has migrated Perl 5 to the Git version control system, making it easier than ever for Perl's development team to continue to improve the language that powers many websites.

Moving from Perforce to git provides a number of benefits to the Perl community:

* With a public repository and Git's extensive support for distributed and offline work, working on Perl 5's source becomes easier for everyone involved.

* Because Git is open source, all developers now have equal access to the tools required to work on Perl's codebase.

* Core committers have less administrative work to do when integrating contributed changes.

* Developers outside the core team can more easily work on experimental changes to Perl before proposing them for inclusion in the next release.

* A vast array of improved repository and change analysis tools are now available to Perl's developers.

* The new Git repository includes every version of Perl 5 ever released, as well as every revision made during development.

In true open source style, Sam Vilain converted Perl's history from Perforce to Git.

Git is an open source version control system designed to handle very large projects with speed and efficiency. Created by Linus Torvalds, the inventor of Linux to handle the vast number of contributions to the Linux Kernel, Git is highly flexible and extensible.

Perl's motto, "There's More Than One Way To Do It!" perfectly matches the Git workflow. Nicholas Clark, the manager for Perl 5.8.9 which was released this week, said: "I'm looking forward to Git giving me the ability to work either online or offline. Perforce is great when I have a network connection, but until now those times when I've been trying to develop on trains or planes, at stations or airports, I'm back in the 'dark ages' before version control. Git solves this problem and more".

Perl has grown into a high-level, general-purpose, dynamic programming language and is widely used for Web development, Systems Administration, Genomics and in many other disciplines.