The recent morbid talk of creating a branch for cairo conversion work makes me think, wouldn't an SCM like git be a huge facilitator for such work? In my mind the one thing that makes branching such a negative is SVN. IMHO SVN is branch possible but not branch friendly.
I've only used git for a few small (and mostly linear) projects at work. So I don't have a huge base of knowledge to speak from. I know mental has been doing quite a bit of research into the workflow for using git locally in combination with a central SVN repo. He would be much more capable to comment on its suitability for Inkscape. (Hopefully he will summarize his for the rest of us sometime.)
One apparent downer is git's level of support for win32. So I thought I'd take a chance to mention a couple of the options in case anyone wants to check them out.
1) git via cygwin. Two major complaints I've heard are: a) that git is slower on cygwin than it is on native unix. Well, of course it is but rarely do you see a comparison with SVN on windows. I did just recently run across the following quote:
"Note: At the time of writing, GIT does not run natively on MSWindows platforms. Several projects are underway to port GIT to Windows but they are not complete yet. It is possible to use git on Win32 via Cygwin, but with slightly worse performance (note: v1.4.5 has several performance enhancements on Cygwin) though even on Cygwin GIT is much faster than CVS or SVN." -- http://docs.moodle.org/en/Tracking_Moodle_CVS_with_git
b) installing cygwin is complex. Perhaps we could lessen this perceived complexity for our devs by providing a unified package as we do for libraries. I recall seeing a few packages that distribute portions of cygwin like this.
In case anyone wants to try, the most detailed description of running git on cygwin that I have found is at http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/WindowsInstall?action=show .
2) mingw git fork. Apparently there is a usable fork of git built with mingw. Info at http://repo.or.cz/w/git/mingw.git .
So maybe win32 won't keep us from git forever.
Aaron Spike