Hi folks,
I saw there was some agitation on IRC about Subversion to Git conversion. I'll put in a +1 for it....for what little MediaWiki development I've done, I've found that it would have been made much much simpler if the main repo was Git/Hg/whatever.
A good primer for the Subversion adherents is "Subversion Re-education" from Joel Spolsky: http://hginit.com/00.html
Don't pay any attention to the fact that it's talking about Mercurial and is pimping his Mercurial-based product. The same DVCS virtues he extols apply to Git or Bazaar or probably even Darcs.
Now, as to *which* DVCS to switch to, here's a pretty persuasive case for Git: http://blog.extracheese.org/2010/05/why-i-switched-to-git-from-mercurial.htm...
(...and I say this as someone who has been using Mercurial for the past couple of years)
Anyway, I've put all of this in the tracking bug for this: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22596
Rob