On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 12:11 PM, Siebrand Mazeland s.mazeland@xs4all.nl wrote:
On 22-03-11 16:38 Trevor Parscal tparscal@wikimedia.org wrote:
My suggestion is that all of this "busy" work is highly automatable, but I'm sure he has a greater ability to assess the complexities of this work than I do.
In general I feel that we should be thinking about "how would we make this work" instead of "why should we not do this".
IMO that a bridge too far. My question is "Why should we make this happen?", and more specifically, what do our various stakeholders (which groups?) gain or lose in case MediaWiki development would shift from Subversion to Git? Only if the gain in the analysis would be greater than the loss, it makes sense to me look look further into a move to Git.
I'd like to really underline this point here. I am *not* sold on using Git, and I think it's premature to assume that we have to make Git work. Siebrand has raised some valid concerns that I think bear considering, even if the process is (semi)automated. Also, the comment about code review is also a point. Right now, CodeReview does not support Git, and really the implementation was never built with Git in mind. I think we could hack it in, but it wouldn't be pretty and if Git's the answer then I think we'll be leaving this tool in favor of something else (I and many others like Gerrit quite a bit). I think migrating our repository is a huge task--one I think should be done slowly, with caution, and a very clear exit path if things go wrong. The status quo isn't great, but we can live with it if Git doesn't pan out how we'd like.
That all being said, I'd like to propose again that we only seek to move phase3 at this time. It's a much smaller chunk of the rest of the repo and is pretty self-contained. It'd give us a chance to work with a smaller dataset both for the metadata rewriting as well as getting *used* to the workflow. We've all used Git before, but every organization's workflow is a little different. Once we spend awhile doing that, I think we'll be in a much better position to evaluate whether we'd like to move extensions over or not.
-Chad