[duskwuff]

It's plausible.

A lot of Debian packages come from small projects, often ones with a single developer. Before 2007, there weren't a lot of options for public source control -- GitHub didn't exist yet, SourceForge's CVS/SVN hosting was a pain to work with, and hosting it yourself was even more of a pain. Many of these small projects were probably only available as release tarballs, so that's what Debian built from.

[blihp]

I guess it depended on which part of the open source crowd you were/are involved with. Pretty much every project I cared about back then, as far back as the mid- to late-90's, had propped up a self-hosted vcs server. I used to run a personal svn server which wasn't that big a deal to set up and nearly zero effort to maintain. Where svn fell apart was the distributed part of the equation: it worked fine for the core developers who had commit access, not so great for anyone else who wanted to contribute back. Even today there are number of projects that are still resistant to git (i.e. git, not github) and clinging to svn.

[oblio]

If even FreeBSD switched to Git I don't think there's any reason for other projects to not do the same, other than inertia/lack of resources.

And I'm saying this as someone who's not super fond of Git (especially the UI).

[zinekeller]

> If FreeBSD switched to Git

If? It already happened: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/heads-up-freebsd-changing...

[oblio]

Rephrased.

[duskwuff]

I'm thinking of the projects that weren't even big enough to have multiple contributors. Nowadays, it's typical for most software authors to have their source code in version control and host it somewhere, regardless of whether there's anyone besides them committing to it. In the mid-2000s, you wouldn't typically go to that effort unless you had multiple active contributors. Single-developer projects, and projects with only occasional outside contributors, wouldn't typically be in public VCS.