One step further towards a DSCM system for OpenOffice.org

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Friday, 27 Mar 2009

One step further towards a DSCM system for OpenOffice.org

Stefan Taxhet

For quite some time now OpenOffice.org has been working on a move from the outdated CVS to a modern Distributed Software Configuration Management (DSCM) system. Last year the Engineering Steering Committee (ESC) agreed in a face-to-face meeting to start with a switch from CVS to Subversion as an interim step. This conversion allowed us to leave all the dead branches and legacy releases behind. The size of the new repository shrank from the projected 100 GB to actual 6 GB. Since October Subversion is in use on our codelines leading to OOo 3.1 and later versions. As it was planned, now is time to go further and migrate to a DSCM. An in-depth evaluation document has been prepared and presented. It shows the pros and cons of Bazaar, Git and Mercurial. While there is a tendency towards Mercurial there was no clear favorite.

So the ESC decided during the March 9/10 face-to-face meeting to run a survey and consult the OpenOffice.org contributors. Contributors were asked about their experience with the different existing OOo repositories, SCMs in general and most important what their prefered DSCM for the OpenOffice.org source code is.

149 contributors participated in the survey - thank you. Most of them worked with OOo's code repositories CVS and SVN. In general participants have experience with the centralized systems CVS and SVN and quite a few know distributed systems already - Mercurial is a bit more familiar than Git.
Experience with OOo repositories General Experience with SCMs

So, what distributed system do our contributors prefer for OpenOffice.org source code?

To me the correlations to general experience and OOo work were interesting. There is almost no difference in preference between the groups who worked on OOo CVS for source or OOo CVS for webcontent or OOo SVN. These are consistent with the overall result.
But looking at the ratio correlated with the general experience, we see that Mercurial users are even more enthusiastic about their system than Git users.

The bottom line?

The system of choice is for 3% Bazaar, for 23% Git and for 49% Mercurial. 25% had no preference.

The Result

Let's see which next steps the ESC will nail down on Monday under consultation of the input from the community.

tags: community dscm openoffice.org repository survey tools

Posted by Stefan Taxhet on 27 Mar 2009 | PermaLink |

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Comments

nim said:

It would probably have been interesting to compare the preferences of SUN and non-SUN contributors. While SUN is the backbone of the OpenOffice.org community, it needs to reach out more to grow.

Posted by nim on March 27, 2009 at 02:52 PM CET #

Richard said:

Two interesting facts:

- the number of people who know Mercurial is slightly bigger than the number of people who know git

- there are more people that know git and prefer Mercurial than people that know Mercurial and prefer git.

Posted by Richard on March 27, 2009 at 03:43 PM CET #

Max said:

Python switching to hg as well:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2009-March/087931.html

Posted by Max on March 31, 2009 at 04:35 PM CEST #