RFR: GIT Package VCS

[Jeremy Katz]

On Wed, 2007-06-06 at 09:17 -0500, Mike McGrath wrote:
> I'm glad this is started back up.  One thing that amuses me is back 
> before the F7 launch it almost seemed assured that we would all go with 
> mercurial.  This line isn't so clear now, a lot of people have been 
> using git.  It seems our future is either going to be A) do nothing and 
> continue with CVS or B) move to HG or Git.

Yeah, definitely time to start this back up.  

> One thing that will be tricky about this is that we'll be completely 
> re-designing  how we use our source management.  Its not just removing 
> cvs and plugging in some other technology in its place.  I think Jesse 
> and Jeremy may have had something particular in mind for this but I'm 
> not sure.  

Right.  I really don't think we want to just take our current system,
switch out CVS, and end up with all of the same workflows.  The change
should be more about how do we improve workflows.  That means thinking
about things like:
* How do we make it easier for a maintainer to rebase their package to a
newer upstream?
* How do we make it easier for a maintainer to develop, test, and create
a patch to fix a problem that's being experienced in Fedora?
* How do we make it easy to send these patches to the upstream of the
project being worked on?
* How do we enable downstreams to take our bits, track them and make
changes as they need/want?
* How do we better enable a user who has a problem with something we
ship to be able to fix it themselves and get the fix back to us?

That's the off the top of my head list to give you sort of the idea of
things that really want to be thought about.  

Because if we're just switching out CVS for {git,hg,bzr,svn,foobarbazl}
and don't think about these things then we're putting all of our
developers onto a learning curve to switch for what is likely to be
little gain.

Jeremy