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.
As far as I am concerned - I'd like to stick with SVN for as long as possible. Even though I *really* like git, we don't gain much by switching. We don't really have the problems with code review mediawiki has, simply because we have much less code committed. However, if wikimedia takes down svn.wikimedia.org at a certain point, we might as well consider switching to a different version control system - essentially the same as what we did when we dropped sf.net for svn.wikimedia.org.
Best, Merlijn