Hi everyone, For a long time, we've been talking about migrating from Subversion to Git. It's time to start getting more serious about it.
First: the need to do this. There is pretty broad acceptance that we should move to a distributed version control system (DVCS). Our current Subversion-based version control system has served us well, but we're in need of a more suitable version control system for our development effort. Our community is very distributed, with many parallel efforts and needs to integrate many different feature efforts. While we've developed lots of coping mechanisms, we sure could use a system that's well suited to more fluid branching and merging. There has been resistance to this in the past, and there still may be some resistance. However, I think we've worn everyone down. :) Next: the selection of Git over other DVCSs. Over the past couple of years, other systems have been mentioned (Bzr, Hg), but there hasn't been any evidence (at least on this mailing list) for anything other than mild support for the alternatives. As you might have seen, our Ops folks have already moved to Git[1], and while they're right in the middle of the tough part of the learning curve, they seem to be adjusting just fine. The complaints seem to be of the "I really need to get used to that" variety rather than the "why are we doing this again?" variety. So, given the momentum that Git has, the ample discussion we've had on the subject, and the fact that Ops is already planning to support Git, this seems to be a settled question. So now, the questions shift from "if?" to "when?" and "how?". When? After some amount of arm twisting by Erik and Brion (*hugz*), I've agreed to float a plan that has us making the migration by the end of the year. This is completely contingent on our ability to get 1.19 deployed in a rapid fashion (which, if we can get through the code review queue at our current rate, could be done in November). Until we have a more fleshed out plan, though, "end of the year" purely a guess, and subject to change (partly based on any ensuing conversation after this mail). However, assuming we can clear the technical hurdles, there's not any procedural issues I can see getting in the way of a rapid transition. How? Lots of unsorted pieces. There are still decisions we need to make: * Code review tool: barring unforeseen complications, we're planning to use Gerrit. We need to make sure it'll be a suitable replacement for our existing tool * How do we break up the repository? One big repo? Extensions each get their own? We need to sort all of that out. A draft plan is available here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Git_conversion Rob [1] ...or so I've read on Slashdot, so it must be true: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/09/21/0531246/wikimedia-foundation-releases-their-server-config _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
