2012/2/2 Merlijn van Deen <valhallasw(a)arctus.nl>nl>:
Hello All,
As you might know, the mediawiki repository is switching to git. Sumana
contacted me to find out whether the pywikipedia community would also be
interested in switching.
Possible reasons for switching are mainly related to to developer workflow:
it's much easier to make small (local) commits, and we can do things like
review-before-merge (even though I don't think this is a large issue). In
addition, it's much easier to browse the history, and something like 'svn
blame' does not take two decades.
The obvious disadvantage is that people will have to switch: they will have
to download new software (git / tortoisegit / whatever), change their
repositories, et cetera.
I can remember a discussion about this, but I cannot find it in my mail
archives - so I'm guessing this was on IRC.
The outcome was mostly concerns about history, and a bit about
infrastructure, since it would have meant moving to bitbucket/github.
(Merlijn knows my background; and where I come from. For others, full
disclosure, I used to contribute to Mercurial) I would recommend
switching to Mercurial or Git, especially if the Foundation will need
review tools / infrastructure for Mediawiki. Whatever process is used
to convert the MW repo can be used to convert the pywikipedia repo.
I'm not concerned / do not care about the higher technical level
required to learn how to use a DVCS. As those tools are getting more
popular, students actually start to use git/mercurial in school; new
developers will soon be more familiar with git than with mercurial.
This being said, I'm not active anymore here, so feel free to ignore
the old guy :)