GNOME and git

[Lucas Rocha <lucasr gnome org>]

Hi all,

It's pretty clear to me that the migration to git is the way to go and
will most likely happen soon. IMO, we (r-t) should come up with an
official decision and message about the chosen DVCS to the community
as soon as possible. By making a decision, we'll allow contributors to
start preparing for the migration in psychological (getting used to
the idea that GNOME will use git) and pragmatic (writing docs, start
using git, helping with testing git.gnome.org, etc) ways before the
migration actually happens.

The decision, obviously, still depends on the status update from Owen
but I'm quite optimistic about it and I guess there won't be any major
blockers reported. Even if there are some sort of (solvable) blockers,
I still think we should come to decision so that we can bring testers
and, possibly, contributors to the git migration process.

My point is: it's the time to change the perception of DVCS topic in
GNOME community from "Which DVCS should be used in GNOME" to "What
should we fix in order to have git fully working in GNOME?".

Suggestion for the decision/message/plan (which strongly depends on
the status update from Owen):

- We chose git as the new VCS for GNOME
- We believe that decision represents the opinion of a vast majority
of our contributors
- We believe moving to a DVCS will potentially allow us to collaborate
more efficiently inside GNOME and with other communities
- We invite the community to
  * test the new preview git repos in git.gnome.org and help us
finding and fixing any issues
  * help us to provide accurate documentation for documentors,
translators and developers
- Migration to git will officially take place just after 2.26.0 release if
  * we have full documentation (or at least a good part of it written)
about how to use git in the daily GNOME development (targetting
documentors, translators, developers, etc)
  * we know the new git.gnome.org is reliable for development and that
any major migration issues has been addressed
- By migrating in the very beginning of the 2.27.x development cycle,
we'll be able to work out any issues very early in the development
process and give enough time for contributors to get used to the new
VCS

Comments?

--lucasr