GNOME to migrate to git

[Lucas Rocha <lucasr gnome org>]

The GNOME Release Team would like to announce that git will be the new Version
Control System (VCS) for GNOME. In our opinion, the decision reflects
the opinion
of the majority of our active contributors.

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
VCS 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, 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 16.

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 realize that git is not perfect, and that the transition will require
significant and important changes to many GNOME processes. With that in mind,
we hope that more community members will step forward to help making the process
as efficient and painless as possible. 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. For instance, modules using svn externals need decision from their
respective maintainers[5].

If you'd like to help, subcribe to gnome-infrastructure[4] and report/discuss
any issues you find there.

Cheers!

The 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
[5] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-infrastructure/2009-March/msg00054.html