Yay. We've started again a new discussion about whether GNOME should move away from svn to $YOURFAVORITEDSCM. On foundation-list, which is not really the best place for it, as Lucas points out. The start of the thread was about some problems people are facing wrt the GNOME infrastructure, and the board is trying to address those, pushing for some solutions, but that's not the topic of this post.

I could talk about distributed source code management and how I'm still a bit skeptical when it comes to this, since I didn't see a lot of people wanting to work on the modules I work on... But instead of using stop energy, I figured I'd try something. So, over this week-end, I took a break from work^[1], and looked a bit at git. It's not the first time I look at it, and last time I did, I just got confused after a few minutes. So I tried harder. And it seems either git improved since last time, or I'm more clever than ever. It's probably not the latter, though.

Now, to the constructive part: I'm making a live test. I've been away from code in the last few weeks, and some modules I'm supposed to maintain could do with some love. If you need a proof that they need some love, just look over there. So help would obviously be welcome, and I've heard people telling that svn is a barrier for contributions. Therefore, let's remove this barrier! I'll try as hard as possible to maintain a git mirror of gnome-desktop, gnome-menus, gnome-panel, gnome-session and libwnck in the next few weeks or months. Since I'll manually do the updates, it will probably lag behind svn every now and then, but it shouldn't really matter much. I'll also try to do my development with git/git-svn.

So, how do you start? Easy:

git clone http://www.gnome.org/~vuntz/git/gnome-desktop.git/
git clone http://www.gnome.org/~vuntz/git/gnome-menus.git/
git clone http://www.gnome.org/~vuntz/git/gnome-panel.git/
git clone http://www.gnome.org/~vuntz/git/gnome-session.git/
git clone http://www.gnome.org/~vuntz/git/libwnck.git/

It's important to note that the official development of those modules still lives in svn.

Don't ask me any question about how git works, or how to publish your branches: I probably won't be able to reply correctly. And of course, you'll need to bear with me: I'm probably going to do some stupid things with git, and I don't have a lot of time so patience is a virtue that you'll need.

Oh, some people might ask why git?. I honestly don't know. It could have been bzr or something else. I don't care that much at this point, and I needed to look at it anyway since some freedesktop.org modules are using git.