NASA uses GIT as the SCM for their Open Projects | Hacker News Reader

NASA uses GIT as the SCM for their Open Projects

vmo.nasa.gov

60 pointslaktek11 comments

I work for NASA Ames (here: http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/groups/intelligent-robotics/). A bunch of us use git where we can, and git-svn for the rest of it.

We're going to be meeting with the lawyers in a few weeks to hopefully get official blessing for pushing any NOSA-licensed project (agency-wide) to github. A couple of my group's projects have open-source releases, but don't really practice open-source development (non-committers can't see the repo). I'm trying to fix that :)

I can keep HN posted if people care, or want to use us as a convincing tool- "hey, the federal government is adopting something faster than you are... something's wrong". Obviously, no promises that it will happen exactly as I say, because... lawyers. We just have to get past their trained skeptical conservatism.

It's worth noting, though, that NASA is not even close to a homogeneous entity. My group is one group in one division at one NASA center (and a smaller center, at that). Many groups are run autonomously by their group leads, and culture is mostly maintained at the group level. Open-source is already here, it's just not distributed equally :)

I am curious about your Git usage, is there an email address you can be reached at? (your hackernews profile is empty)

mike[at]fluffypenguin.org (I've added it to my profile now, too). For some reason, it's taken me a long time to realize that the email I put into my profile isn't visible to others unless I also put it in the about box :)

I could imagine that this might be helpful to convince a boss or a colleague that git is not some obscure hacker tool ("Look, even NASA uses it").

This doesn't mean NASA as a whole uses it. It really comes down to who is in charge of the project.

Some NASA centers in certain departments mandate the use of certain technologies, for instance .NET and sourcesafe.

I worked on some internal projects at NASA and used git though. A buddy of mine at USGS uses git for all of his work.

really? i'm not surprised at all that nasa uses git to manage open source projects. i'd be more surprised if they didn't.

hearing/confirming that nasa uses git internally for all of their mission-critical code would be something different.

Still, just saying "some piece of the federal government uses it" is a very strong case for it being enterprise-ready.

Upvoted!

While I don't necessary like the way how people in our industry tried to infuse new technology to their working place, someone has to do it somehow and I suppose this is the shortest way to convince upper-level: pick a famous company/corporate/organization as an example instead base on needs.

Helpful, but not nearly as helpful as if they endorsed it. There's not enough context here to know whether they are happy with git in practice.

NASA also uses Django. Here's the first link I found by google: http://nebula.nasa.gov/services/framework/ but there is also someone whose blog is frequently featured on the Django community aggregator that works for NASA.

... (Searching w/ Reader) ...

Daniel Greenfield! http://pydanny.blogspot.com/

It's worth noting that Danny Greenfield's team and the Nebula team each choose to use Django independently.

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