Distributed SCM in Gnome (Was: Git vs SVN (was: Can we improve things?))

[Kevin Kubasik <kevin kubasik net>]

NOTE: I'm sorry if this comes out oddly formatted or something, I'm using
an old SVN checkout of roundcube to send, as Gmail has decided I'm a
spammer or something[1]....

Hey, as many of you know, there has been an ongoing discussion in
foundation-list about this for a few days now. It was recently realized
that foundation-list is not really the place for such a discussion. 

I have started a Wiki page where I hope to summarize most of the discussion
that took place in
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2007-September/thread.html
(there were several relevant threads, I hope its not impossible to find
them). 

For those who were already were a part of the conversation on
foundation-list, please feel free to continue as before, if you are new to
this discussion, please take a moment to read the wiki page, or skim the
archives so we don't end up back at square one.

That being said, the current discussion page is at
http://live.gnome.org/DistributedSCM (Moved from
http://live.gnome.org/gitMigration) I will try to update it with most of
the information from the original discussion over the course of this
evening, however, a lot of opinions have been voiced, and it will take a
while. 

A few key points:
 * There is a _very_ strong general opinion that Gnome should eventually
move to a DSCM system, it is really just a discussion of how and when. 
 * The 3 systems under consideration are bzr,git, and hg. There has not
been much discussion on which to choose, it is probably better that people
include their experiences with these tools on the wiki page. (please
provide hard numbers to backup statements! Don't just say its slow, give us
a time it took to perform a task! Don't just say it takes up a lot of
space? How much? and preferably, provide comparisons for the other systems
if possible) 
 * A major concern is allowing our current translation and documentation
teams to continue to work without serious interruption. Many of those
contributers are less technical, or simply have less interest in playing
around with software to figure it out ;). Also, translators don't want an
entire repository to edit one po file, can a single file be checked out
locally and modified? There was even discussion of a web interface, but the
most important thing here is if we were to move to web system for
translations, it would have to _already written_ before any real talk of it
continued. (perhaps Launchpad will have completely open sourced that
component, and we could use their system) But we want to avoid discussions
of vaporware here, if we are going to talk about a program that can do
something for the translators, please present a link to a project we can
use or modify, or some proof of concept code. 
* There is a debate over the difficulty of using a new distributed system,
it seems that alot of developers already use a DSCM somewhere else, and as
a result, are quite comfortable with the technical component (although the
social structure for sharing branches we choose etc. could change their
current use) 

Anyways, everyone's input is welcome, just please follow the
http://live.gnome.org/CodeOfConduct
and respect everyones opinion, this is a discussion, not a deathmatch. ;) 

[1]
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?ctx=%67mail&hl=en&answer=22839
-- 
Cheers,
Kevin Kubasik
http://kubasik.net/blog