Re: DVCS

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Tue, 2008-10-28 at 16:24 +0200, Zeeshan Ali Khattak wrote:
> Hi everyone!
>   I remember that at GUADEC, we were seriously thinking about
> migrating to git but the decision was postponed on Mark Shuttleworth's
> request. It's been some months since that and we are still stuck with
> SVN. AFAIK both git and bazaar have very strong supporters in our
> community so the only way I see out of this is:
> 
> 1. Get someone (known and trusted) to volunteer to set-up and maintain
> the repository. I think Olav likes bazaar so he would volunteer for
> that?
> 2. Assuming that we get volunteers for both the repository types, we
> simply vote amongst the top 50 contributers (i myself most probably
> don't count :))

I'm trying to understand exactly your proposal.  Are
you proposing we have both a git server and a bzr
server, each with a full import of all modules from
svn?  And then developers can choose which one they
develop with?

Ooh, a numbered list!

1) What happens if multiple developers of a module
each choose differently?  All right, maybe we can
expect some level of communication and agreement
amont co-maintainers.

2) What happens when we pick one?  Can we cleanly
get everything off the losing server?

3) What are translators and documentation writers
supposed to do?  Do we honestly expect them to look
at the histories to decide which SCM to use for each
module?  That sounds infeasible.

4) What metric we use for picking one is going to be
the subject of much controversy.  Developer activity?
Module activity?  Counted by number of developers?
Number of commits?  Size of commits?

Believe me, I desperately want to not be using svn
anymore.  And if I thought we could feasibly work
with a live-and-let-live, use-what-you-want setup,
I'd be all over that.

--
Shaun