New collaboration era: moved to git, hosted on github!

March 7, 2012

Because all the cool kids do it!

After some trials in the last few months, we have finally made the move to the git distributed source control and are hosting our repository on the famous github.com site.

Our old system (monotone + viewmtn) started to show its age especially on the performance, ease to contribute and ease of asynchronous code-review fronts.

git solves some of these problems by being faster, widely used, thoroughly documented and supporting a wide range of workflows.

While github solves the rest with its amazing code review system (aka pull requests), its ability to make changes without even touching the command-line and doing the hand-holding required to setup git, submit pull requests, etc..

This move is effective now and we encourage anyone with out-of-tree patches to push them in a fork of our packetfence repository.

Workflow wise we decided to go with feature branches that we will periodically merge on the stable (next minor release) or the devel (next major release) branches. We hope this will allow us to still release incremental changes often while allowing new and exciting changes to be tested by the broader community through our -devel packages.

Finally, we will be updating all the various references to our old monotone repository and update our workflow to embrace the git way in the course of the following weeks. Hang tight as it might be rockier than usual. As usual feedback will be appreciated!