A while ago I opened a bug asking to make it easier to use bzr-mirror.gnome.org with JHBuild. I proposed a patch which still needed some love, but wasn’t really sure how to finish it. It added a flag so you can say, “if there is a mirror of this for {bzr,git} users, use it”. Recently, thanks to zeenix pestering, I finished it. Of course he quickly identified some issues, which led to changes to the JHBuild code for svn, git and bzr. Among other things, SVN finally got tag support, and has a more consistent decision making path. And JHBuild-controlled-Git can handle branches a lot nicer now.

The more I think about it the more I don’t want to pick a single DVCS for GNOME. It should be up to whoever is doing the work to use whatever tools they want. Unfortunately having each module choose its own hosting format has its own problems - do i need to check out gnome-super-cool from bzr.gnome.org or darcs.gnome.org? What if maintainer A likes cvs and maintainer B likes Git.

<snipped out the bit where i ramble about all the different options people have already suggested. me rambling FTYawn>

There is another approach. The Git protocol is quite easy. The Git pack container format is easy. The basic Git objects are easy. Who says i have to store Git packs in Git? As long as the client Git can grab packs and push packs it is happy. All other operations are local.

Having recently taken some books home, I find myself with “On Language” as the nearest book for the great book meme (Rob, a few metres to my rear, ended up with something much cooler).

In the same way, if somone speaks a collection of dialects, you will only discover a great confusion if you do not separate the elements of which this ensemble is composed.

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