Breathing life back into libqgit2

It’s been a long time since I last wrote about libqgit2. There has been only slow progress in the library since then, except for the last few months when some big improvements have taken place.

Moved to Github

The main repository is now in Github. The previous repository in KDE infrastructure still exists but it only acts as a mirror. The reason for this change is that more people are familiar with Github than with the KDE tools and more people already have a Github account. This lowers the barrier for entry for potential contributors.

Now libgit2 version 0.27 compatible

For years libqgit2 has been stuck on the libgit2 version 0.22 API. The reason for this is simply that nobody needed to update the code base. But now the needed changes have been made and the current master branch supports (and only works with) libgit2 version 0.27. This work was done by Matti Virolainen.

No release from this 0.27 branch has been tagged yet. The reason for this is that there are some places in libqgit2 that would desperately need changes in the API design and there is now an opportunity to change the libqgit2 API before freezing it for the 0.27 version.

Few other notable changes

Qt4 is no longer supported. The reason for this is that Qt4 is very old already and the few developers working on this project don’t have Qt4 installed anymore.

A C++11 capable compiler is now needed to build libqgit2. This enables using some very nice features from the C++ language that weren’t available previously.