While I'm on the subject of big changes...
In the near future I am going to move Premake development from SourceForge to BitBucket, and in the process from Subversion to Mercurial.
My main motivation is to make it easier for people to hack on and contribute to Premake (I've started under-the-hood documentation as well). I want to remove myself as the bottleneck. Social coding is a brilliant idea, and I would like Premake to benefit from these new community features.
Moving to a DVCS also has the nice bonus of making it easier to work on parallel branches of development. Merging is orders of magnitude better than Subversion. Which means I'll be spending less time applying the same bug fixes to multiple branches, and more time actually developing. Always good.
I chose BitBucket over GitHib because of Mercurial. I chose Mercurial over git because Mercurial is a little easier to get set up, has a little better Windows support, has a little better documentation, and is a little easier to learn. Git is a little more powerful, but not in any way that will really benefit this project. Otherwise, both products and both sites are so close that you might as well flip a coin.
For those of you not familiar with Mercurial, here is an easy and excellent introduction from Joel Spolsky.
Your thoughts on the switch are welcome. I'd like to know what everyone thinks (although I'm pretty sure this is the way I'm going to go). Oh, and for now at least, file hosting and issue tracking will remain on SourceForge, and forums and documentation will remain here at Industrious One.
Update: Premake is now available on BitBucket. I am in the process of updating the documentation and website.
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Great changes, bravo.
This got posted on the mailing list; re-posting here for the benefit of those not on the list:
On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 9:57 PM, Ryan P. wrote:
> These are my personal feelings. For me I will now require 3 different VCS
> and I am not that happy about it. Most projects seem to be moving to Git so
> I have accepted that as a secondary option because I can plug it into SVN on
> the back end part (it can easily push/pull to and from an SVN repository).
> Also I thought SourceForge had Git and Murcurual support. Why switch the
> entire community to another place after a life has been created at SF?
Let me split this into two parts, and my apologies for the length.
FIRST, moving from Subversion to Mercurial:
For the most part I really like Subversion, it has served me well. But merging sucks. It just does. Subversion doesn't have enough information on the client to figure out anything more than the simplest cases. With Premake I didn't used to care so much because it was small and I could get away with working on the trunk. But it, and the community, have gotten bigger and I'm not going to get away with that much longer.
People can and do use Subversion (and even CVS) with multiple development branches and they muddle through. But there are better tools that make this a /lot/ easier. Which is why the writing is on the wall for Subversion. I don't think it will ever go away (some people still use CVS, or even *gasp* VSS), but you'll be seeing a lot of projects migrate. If you are still in the Subversion camp I would encourage you to go read Joel Spolsky's introduction to Mercurial at http://hginit.com/.
So then it comes down to Mercurial and Git. As I mentioned, they are so close in functionality that you might as well flip a coin to decide. After using both for a couple of weeks, I feel that Mercurial is easier, to both learn and use. As the person who has to field everyone's questions, that is important to me.
I *could* jump through a bunch of hoops and set up bridges to Subversion and git so that everyone can work in their comfort zone. But I quite honestly don't want the extra work; maybe someone else will volunteer. If you want, you can use those bridges to work locally in Subversion or Git, as Ryan mentioned.
I could be swayed to choose Git and GitHub instead of Hg and BitBucket, although I admit I would do so grudgingly. But it is time to move on from Subversion.
(deep breath)
SECOND: moving from SourceForge to BitBucket.
Yes, SourceForge has Mercurial repositories, as does Google Code and CodePlex. At the end of the day, where the repository is hosted only matters on your first checkout. Do you type sourceforge.net or code.google.com into the URL? After that, you push and pull and don't care where it goes so long as it works.
The website, issue tracking, forums, and file downloads are staying where they are. To say I am "switch[ing] the entire community" is an overstatement (I may move those too in the future, but for the sake of brevity we can address that later). You never have to visit the BitBucket site, much less use any of the features. That's still your
choice.
I want Premake on BitBucket because it (and GitHub too, FWIW) makes coding more collaborative. And really, if you are into open source coding you should check these sites out. People can easily pull a project's code, make changes in their own local repositories, and then share the changes with the community. Because merging actually works, others can easily apply these changes to their own local repositories. You can provide feedback and iterate on the changes.
The end result is that development becomes more decentralized. You no longer have to wait on a gatekeeper (me). If someone wants Cool Feature X they can code it up, and everyone can use it right away. They can talk about it and make it better. And at any time I can easily pull it into the "official" repository. It is a new model for development and, again, worth checking out if you haven't already.
(whew)
Okay. Thanks for sharing your concerns, and hopefully I answered your question somewhere in there. Please feel free to continue with "Yeah, but..." ;)
-st.