[haiku-development] Proposal: Moving away from Subversion

Hi there,

inspired by recent experience, I'd like to propose that we move away from 
using subversion as our version control system and use a distributed VCS 
instead.

The most obvious advantages of such a move is that we'd be able to commit 
without being connected to the central repo and that branching/merging 
would be less of a pain.

Mercurial and git have been discussed on this list already and I think 
those two are the most likely candidates. 

I personally favour Mercurial because of its simplicity and higher cmdline 
compatibility with subversion. 
Additionally, the documentation of mercurial seems to be much more 
accessible than git's manpages and trac's mercurial plugin seems to be in a 
better shape than the ones for git.

I have not yet checked the state of haiku's git port, but I've noticed that 
in order to get mercurial working on haiku, we'd need to fix quite some 
failing tests in Python's as well as Mercurial's testsuite.

With any of git or mercurial, I'd suggest to keep the central repository 
approach, but additionally give every developer the chance to create a 
clone from the central repo in his home folder (which would then be part of 
the backup scheme).
This way, everyone could experiment in his own repo or commit directly into 
the central repo.

Anyway, I'd like to hear any input on whether or not we should drop 
subversion and, if so, which way we should go.

cheers,
        Oliver

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