New candidate JEP: 357: Migrate from Mercurial to Git

[Kevin Rushforth]

We setup a developer "sandbox" mirror repo on GitHub [1] for the OpenJFX 
project a while ago to see if that would encourage more community 
participation. We configured it so that only OpenJFX Project Committers 
can merge pull requests, and the CONTRIBUTING guidelines [2] are such 
that we follow all OpenJDK processes: we require an OCA from all 
Contributors, a JBS bug ID, an RFR email to the openjfx-dev mailing 
list, etc., and the final changeset is still pushed to 
hg.openjdk.java.net as usual. This GitHub sandbox is effectively an 
alternative to posting webrevs on cr.openjdk.java.net.

I was initially a little skeptical that this would increase community 
participation, but it has done so significantly, by lowering the barrier 
to entry (although obviously not so low that we accept random pull 
requests). I am very much looking forward to the switch to git, and 
seeing project Skara move forward.

-- Kevin

[1] https://github.com/javafxports/openjdk-jfx
[2] 
https://github.com/javafxports/openjdk-jfx/blob/develop/.github/CONTRIBUTING.md


On 7/16/2019 3:41 AM, Mario Torre wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 16, 2019 at 12:23 PM Emmanuel Bourg <ebourg at apache.org> wrote:
>> Le 16/07/2019 à 11:49, Mario Torre a écrit :
>>
>>> and from what I see tooling support and size
>>> of the download are the two only reason to use git
>> One obvious benefit that is worth mentioning in the JEP I think is that
>> Git is significantly more popular than Mercurial, and using what becomes
>> a standard tool lowers the barrier of entry for new contributors. A mere
>> read-only Git mirror doesn't help unifying the community around a common
>> set of tools and workflows.
> Maybe, but I don't think this is a real problem. The entry barrier to
> contribution is high not because of git vs mercurial, but because of
> the process itself, even if we were to move to GitHub I doubt that
> would change. For example, we still don't allow anyone to file a bug
> report on the project bug database unless they are at least Authors
> and a bug id is required for any push to take place. Can you see this
> changing to allow random push request over GitHub?
>
> Cheers,
> Mario
>
>