This is probably unconventional, but hey, it's been at least an hour since I've sent a message to an Evergreen mailing list and I'm jonesing for a fix.
It seems clear to me that our community already could benefit from adopting a DVCS - many of us are using *-svn to try to track one of the SVN branches in bzr, git, and hg. And sites are doing custom development in their own repos: Sitka has the mobile OPAC work, for example, and KCLS has their custom skin, and I'm sure others exist. At Conifer, we've been trying to use the ILS-Contrib SVN repository, but not many others seem to use it. So maybe it's time to consider formally adopting a DVCS? In which case, the very heavy gorilla these days is git. I've learned enough git to pull from a branch in a github repository and push to a branch in a gitorious repository and to do a bit of development in a local branch... which is fine for as far as that goes. I'm curious, though, in learning how people deal for real with many, many branches spread across a community; cherry-picking, merging, rebasing, etc, without getting lost. http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0374/ provides a nice summary of the workflows for SVN vs. Bazaar vs. Mercurial vs. git (the Python developers chose Mercurial over git). Let's assume that we would opt to go with the herd and adopt git in the hopes of attracting more contributions to our core Evergreen and OpenSRF distributions. I think it would make for a killer presentation to go through our project's common workflows and show how git would improve our lives (as well, of course, as how to perform said workflow in git, with git's apparent love of flags for common operations). If we did want to adopt git, then making the changeover as easy as possible so that precious developer time is not wasted would be a good thing - and this sort of presentation would be a big help. And I'm definitely _not_ the person to give this presentation :) To really be unconventional, I think it would be awesome to schedule a session immediately following a git presentation strictly for discussion and planning: when to make the change; who is going to do what; where would the primary repo be hosted; how will we provide web-based access / commit mailing list / etc; how will this interoperate with bug reporting and tracking, who will update the "developer howto" docs that we currently provide via the wiki on contributing to the project, yada yada. So... any thoughts here? I think we would probably want an agreement in principle that we want to move to a DVCS before asking someone to propose a session and asking the Conference Committee to set aside two consecutive slots, and maybe the end of December isn't the best time to have that discussion, but I wanted to get these thoughts out while they're relatively fresh.
