On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 9:11 AM, Siebrand Mazeland s.mazeland@xs4all.nl wrote:
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.
The short answer is that, in Subversion, merging is difficult and highly error prone. As a result, we're forced into a workflow where things go straight into trunk, and code review must happen on individual revisions rather than branches with bundles of related revisions. This is inefficient for reviewers, which is a very large bottleneck in our current system. Because we can't practically ask reviewers to use branches, we put far too much Neil covers this in more detail in a recent thread.
The most convincing general Subversion->DVCS argument I've read is here: http://hginit.com/00.html
This argument refers to Mercurial, but the same benefits apply to Git.
Rob