On Fri, 7 Dec 2007 11:58:31 -0800, Bryce Harrington <bryce@...961...> wrote:
Longer term, probably following the 0.46 release, it sounds like there's strong support for moving to a distributed version control system (probably either git or bzr). These systems greatly reduce the need for something like a patch tracker, since cloning, branching, and merging are very easy.
The main role of the patch tracker is really to provide assignable work items to make sure that patches really get reviewed/merged by someone; so long as we still have an "authoritative tree", I don't see that need going away with the introduction of a DSCM -- actual patches may simply get replaced by serialized changesets.
Incidentally, as far as DSCMs go, I'd personally recommend either git or mercurial. git is more robust (I would prefer to keep our core history in git format) and has better analysis tools (which I've come to rely on heavily), but mercurial is much less user-hostile.
In an ideal world, it would be nice if people had the option to use mercurial to commit to a git repository in a similar fashion to how some people (me, at least) use git to commit to an SVN repository today. I think that would do a pretty decent job of making everyone happy. git interoperability is supposed to be a goal of Mercurial, but I've not found much documentation on it yet.
-mental