[development] A Git mirror for Drupal CVS

[Karoly Negyesi]

> Just to add my two cents worth... This concept is doubly important, not
> only in ridding the Drupal Community of the deprecated CVS on the level
> of source code versioning; but also because of its powerful distribution
> features: it is a _distributed_ version control system.

However great git is, given the huge number of our contributors using Windows and on various levels of knowledge about RCS systems, anything without a proper Windows port and a Tortoise-alike interface has no chance. To my knowledge, current this means Mercurial: 2007-12-02: First public release (0.0.1) of TortoiseHg with binary installer. Since then there were three more releases -- quite an active project. There is a http://repo.or.cz/w/git-cheetah.git/ which says "This is an explorer extension in its infancy. Do not expect anything to work, unless you are fixing it." -- unless this becomes useable, git is out of question.

We have a versioncontrol module (thanks to jpetso) and thanks to GHOP, students has written svn (ok this needed just finalizing), git and hg bridges for it.

We all experiment with this or that DRCS, I am running bzr for core development, Gordon (and if memory serves, Ber too) was running darcs before and now Gordon runs git etc. Neither the GHOP project nor these experiments mean that "that Git is catching on around the Drupal community. I hope some day to be able to look back at CVS as only a bad memory". 

Do we want to change? I presume that the project-VCS API integration happens eventually so drupal.org is ready (this is quite a stretch). Well, after many years I am not so sure. Are the niceties of SVN over CVS are enough to make such a big change? What this buys us? Will the hard concepts of branching and tagging become easier for our contrib authors? I doubt. 

Can people learn any DRCS be it hg or git? With a DRCS you have the quite powerful concepts of developing here and there and then merging... I am quite unsure this will be too easy for our contributors.

Drupal is quite a unique project here. We not just have thousands of contrib authors, among these are theme developers who have skills I can only envy but on the other hand, the RCS systems developed primarily for coder nerds are hard for them. I am not talking of translators here, I hope Drupal translation server will come online and remove them from the contrib repo. And also there are coders who are among the greatest contributors to Drupal, coding and again, any RCS concepts are not easy for them.

Do not reply to this list unless you have very, very well thought out answers. I am experimenting with alternates for three years now and my stance is now "change? hmmmm not so sure" -- do not rush your answer. I do not want another iteration of "let's switch to foo RCS", we had this discussion too many times.

Instead of switching, I would like to call out to the developer community -- how can we make it easier to use these systems? Can we offer a web upload for example for themers? FTP maybe, somehow?

Kind regards,

Karoly Negyesi