Re: increasing the number of GCC reviewers

[Daniel Berlin <dberlin@dberlin.org>]

On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 8:51 PM, Joseph S. Myers<joseph@codesourcery.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 9 Jun 2009, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
>
>> I believe that the most useful immediate thing we could do to speed up
>> gcc development would be to move to a distributed version control
>> system.
>
> We haven't even finished the last version control system transition
> (wwwdocs is still using CVS), it's not long since we started it and there
> is as yet no one clear winner in the world of DVCSes, so another
> transition would seem rather premature.
There will never be a clear winner here, because none of them is
"better enough" than the others, nor is it likely they ever will be.
At least hg and git have significant mindshare, and seem to attract
different kinds of communities.

Personally, I think at this point, moving to git would make the most
sense (as much as I love hg). It's much more forgiving than it used to
be, most things support it, and there are some cool possibilities,
like gerrit (http://code.google.com/p/gerrit/).  It is precisely built
to handle the problem of finding the right reviewers, making sure
patches don't fall through the cracks, while still making sure it's
easy to submit patches and have maintainers merge them.
I'm happy to set up a demo if anyone wants to see it.

As for advantages, having used both hg and git, the only thing i ever
use svn for anymore is to occasionally patch into a clean tree to do a
commit.

Lastly, as for wwwdocs, it's more a case of "migration of wwwdocs was
left to those who care about it", which is a very small set of people.
Combined with the fact that it has a bunch of preprocessing/etc
scripts that get run over it, and nobody wants to do the conversion.