[DRAFT] GNOME to migrate to git

[Lucas Rocha <lucasr gnome org>]

Hey,

Here's a very first sketchy version of the git migration announcement.
The suggested plan is to migrate everything just after the 2.26.1
release (April 14).

Owen: it would be nice if you could add a bit more data about the
current status of the migration. Does the migration date makes sense
for the migration team?

Everyone: please, suggest improvements and fixes.

We should send out this announcement asap so that the community is
aware of the decision very early in the 2.27.x cycle.

Cheers!

--lucasr

------------------

The GNOME Release Team would like to announce that git has been chosen as the
new Version Control System (VCS) for GNOME. In our opinion, the decision on git
represents the opinion of a vast majority of our active contributors base.

In December 2008, Behdad Esfahbod organized the GNOME DVCS (Distributed Version
Control System) Survey on behalf of the GNOME Foundation board of directors,
Release Team, and Sysadmin Team with the aim of better understanding
familiarity and preferences of our active contributor base regarding the future
version control system for GNOME. The survey results[1], released in January
2009, show that git is by far the preferred DVCS for the majority of our active
contributors - the main users of GNOME infrastructure. Elijah Newren has made
an in-depth analysis of the results[2].

Since January 2009, a group of brave contributors (Owen Taylor, Kristian
Høgsberg, Behdad Esfahbod, Federico Quintero, Elijah Newren, and others) have
been working on the migration of our Subversion repositories to git[3]. The
git migration team is documenting their progress at:

  http://live.gnome.org/GitMigration

The new git.gnome.org server is now in good shape and contains a functional
preview of all GNOME git repositories. The official migration of all our
Subversion repositories to git will take place just after the 2.26.1
release, on April 14.
The git migration team is now working on sorting out the last details of the
migration and providing complete documentation on how to use git on daily GNOME
contributions (for documentors, translators, developers, etc). 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 cycle and give enough time for
contributors to get used to the new VCS.

We'd like to invite the community to: a) help us to provide accurate
documentation for documentors, translators and developers; b) test the preview
repositories in git.gnome.org and help the git migration team on finding and
fixing any issues in the repositories you work on. If you'd like to help,
subcribe to gnome-infrastructure[4] and report/discuss any issues you find
there.

Cheers!

GNOME Release Team

[1] http://www.gnome.org/~behdad/dvcs-survey/
[2] http://blogs.gnome.org/newren/2009/01/03/gnome-dvcs-survey-results/
[3] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2009-January/msg00137.html
[4] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-infrastructure