For a long time Firefox Desktop development has supported both Mercurial and Git users. This dual SCM requirement places a significant burden on teams which are already stretched thin in parts. We have made the decision to move Firefox development to Git.

  • We will continue to use Bugzilla, moz-phab, Phabricator, and Lando
  • Although we’ll be hosting the repository on GitHub, our contribution workflow will remain unchanged and we will not be accepting Pull Requests at this time
  • We’re still working through the planning stages, but we’re expecting at least six months before the migration begins

APPROACH

In order to deliver gains into the hands of our engineers as early as possible, the work will be split into two components: developer-facing first, followed by piecemeal migration of backend infrastructure.

Phase One - Developer Facing

We’ll switch the primary repository from Mercurial to Git, at the same time removing support for Mercurial on developers’ workstations. At this point you’ll need to use Git locally, and will continue to use moz-phab to submit patches for review.

All changes will land on the Git repository, which will be unidirectionally synchronised into our existing Mercurial infrastructure.

Phase Two - Infrastructure

Respective teams will work on migrating infrastructure that sits atop Mercurial to Git. This will happen in an incremental manner rather than all at once.

By the end of this phase we will have completely removed support of Mercurial from our infrastructure.

  • @TCB13English
    88•1 year ago

    Although we’ll be hosting the repository on GitHub

    Why aren’t they using a self-hosted instance of Gitea? This makes no sense move to Github of all places.

    • OtterEnglish
      55•1 year ago

      Could be familiarity? I saw an article go by recently about how projects that aren’t on GitHub suffer from lack of contributions. Although that matters more for smaller projects, Mozilla is a beast and could probably pull people off GitHub if it wanted to.

      Also if anyone should be trying to build up an alternative to GitHub, it should be Mozilla

      • dinckel
        30•1 year ago

        If you are at a skill level, where you can meaningfully contribute to a project like this, registering for an alternative git provider should not be an obstacle

      • @[email protected]English
        17•1 year ago

        I agree with this in a lot of cases, but I’m not sure about this case - Mozilla won’t be accepting PRs over GitHub from what I can tell.

      • @[email protected]
        11•1 year ago

        Git desperately needs something like activity pub. That’s how it should have been from the beginning

        • @sir_reginald
          8•1 year ago

          and it was lol. Git was designed to work using email and plain text patches. No nonsense, no closed platforms. You can still use git that way.

          • @[email protected]
            1•1 year ago

            It’s super cool that it supports this, heck I’ve used it when no other options were there (and thank git I could! It made a nightmare into just a little more work instead).

            I will say though, it’s most of the other software forge features that people normally talk about adding Activity Pub support for (issues tracking, merge requests, tracking forks, CI tooling, handling documentation, etc).

        • @TCB13English
          7•1 year ago

          Maybe you can convince Gitea guys to work on that? After all they’re the leading open-source alternative.

    • ChewyOP
      18•1 year ago

      Agreed. They could’ve hosted nearly any git forge since they’ll keep using bugzilla and other workflows as is.

    • @[email protected]
      5•1 year ago

      It’s the most widely used platform that the most people are familiar with that they get to use likely for free. Newer projects of theirs are also hosted there. Why would you say it makes no sense?

    • @merthyr1831
      1•1 year ago

      Hosting the public repo? I heard that the GH repo is just a mirror