During this year’s LinuxTag, I’ve taken the chance to enter discussions and get feedback on development habits in 2013. Development based on tarballs certainly was the norm when I started in Free Software & Open Source, that was 1996. It’s totally not the case these days. A large number of projects moved to Git or the likes. Rapicorn and Beast have been moved to Git several years ago, we adopted the commit style of the Linux kernel and a GNU-style ChangeLog plus commit hash ids is auto-generated from Git for the tarballs. Utilizing the meta information for a project living in Git comes naturally as time passes and projects get more familiar with Git. Examples are signed tags, scripts around branch-/merge-conventions, history greping or symbolic version id generation. Git also significantly improves spin-off developments which is why development of Git hosted projects generally happens in Git branches or Git clones these days. Sites like github encourage forking and pulling, going back to the inconveniences of tarball based development baring any history would be a giant leap backwards. In fact, these days tarballs serve as little more than a transport container for a specific snapshot of a Git repository.