Firefox Development Is Moving From Mercurial To Git

For a long time Firefox Desktop development has supported both Mercurial and Git users. This dual SCM requirement places a significant burden on teams which are already stretched thin in parts. We have made the decision to move Firefox development to Git.

  • We will continue to use Bugzilla, moz-phab, Phabricator, and Lando
  • Although we’ll be hosting the repository on GitHub, our contribution workflow will remain unchanged and we will not be accepting Pull Requests at this time
  • We’re still working through the planning stages, but we’re expecting at least six months before the migration begins

APPROACH

In order to deliver gains into the hands of our engineers as early as possible, the work will be split into two components: developer-facing first, followed by piecemeal migration of backend infrastructure.

Phase One - Developer Facing

We’ll switch the primary repository from Mercurial to Git, at the same time removing support for Mercurial on developers’ workstations. At this point you’ll need to use Git locally, and will continue to use moz-phab to submit patches for review.

All changes will land on the Git repository, which will be unidirectionally synchronised into our existing Mercurial infrastructure.

Phase Two - Infrastructure

Respective teams will work on migrating infrastructure that sits atop Mercurial to Git. This will happen in an incremental manner rather than all at once.

By the end of this phase we will have completely removed support of Mercurial from our infrastructure.

uis,
@uis@lemmy.world avatar
  • Although we’ll be hosting the repository on GitHub, our contribution workflow will remain unchanged and we will not be accepting Pull Requests at this time

Whyyyyy? Why github?

kogasa,
@kogasa@programming.dev avatar

Reviewing PRs costs money/time

TCB13,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

Although we’ll be hosting the repository on GitHub

Why aren’t they using a self-hosted instance of Gitea? This makes no sense move to Github of all places.

otter,

Could be familiarity? I saw an article go by recently about how projects that aren’t on GitHub suffer from lack of contributions. Although that matters more for smaller projects, Mozilla is a beast and could probably pull people off GitHub if it wanted to.

Also if anyone should be trying to build up an alternative to GitHub, it should be Mozilla

dinckelman,

If you are at a skill level, where you can meaningfully contribute to a project like this, registering for an alternative git provider should not be an obstacle

lolcatnip,

Obstacle? No. Annoyance? Yes.

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