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.
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.
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
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
Obstacle? No. Annoyance? Yes.
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.
Git desperately needs something like activity pub. That’s how it should have been from the beginning
Maybe you can convince Gitea guys to work on that? After all they’re the leading open-source alternative.
Lets just say it’s coming… soon :)
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.
ForgeJo?
The J is lowercase, -ejo is an Esperanto suffix meaning “place”.
Pull people off GitHub? I get the impression from others that contributing to Mozilla projects, particularly Firefox, is a painful experience. But afaik one former Mozilla project uses GitHub for everything: Rust, the programming language.
Agreed. They could’ve hosted nearly any git forge since they’ll keep using bugzilla and other workflows as is.
They already use GitHub for a bunch of other projects. See https://github.com/mozilla/ and https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/
Out of all the possible Git choices, they chose one of the worst options. I am very curious about the reasoning for that. Could have been a Mozilla-hosted Gitlab instance, or something else like Gitea
Why do you say GitHub is the worst choice, out of curiosity?
Especially lately, incredibly poor performance, and constant outages. Plus if you’re an owner of a private repository, I don’t want them to train their asshole AI based on my code, without my knowledge
And Micro$oft
At least when it comes to Git I’m not too concerned. What could MS possibly do to you? Maybe vendor lock in via the issue tracker? They aren’t using it and it’s not exactly that hard to migrate off of it in the first place.
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Would have been amazing if they federated with Forgejo and supported federated git like they’re doing with mastodon.
GitHub is Trash
TLDW : GitHub PR’s are atrocious, it’s good for hosting code, but using it for large collaborative projects is a no go. - Linus Torvalds (creator of git)I agree that PRs are problematic, but that doesn’t make GitHub “trash”.
Also, that dude is so obnoxious and really seems to like to make broad generalizations of his opinion like it’s fact.
and really seems to like to make broad generalizations of his opinion like it’s fact.
None of what Brodie said is baseless, even if some are more opinion than fact. He sight’s sources for a reason.
He sight’s sources for a reason.
I’d hope so. It wouldn’t be good if they were blind.
Anyway, I didn’t question the accuracy of what he said, just that his manner of delivery is obnoxious and portrays an attitude of self-importance. It feels like he’s yelling at the viewer with hostility.
Aussies tend to be quite direct. It’s basically our natural state. I get how it can be perceived as hostile, but I don’t actually think Brodie is very abrasive. He seems like a pretty relaxed guy.
He’s literally talking to the viewer the same way the vast majority of YouTubers speak, he’s just Australian.
I’m just curious, why are PRs worse on GitHub compared to other git hosting services?
Instead of using valid commit messages they just slap on “#42” which isn’t valid anywhere other than the GitHub web UI.
Also, GitHub PRs atleast to me feel like they encourage reviewing changes by the total diff of the entire PR, and not each commit. I don’t want a slog of commits that don’t add any value - it just makes doing things like reverts more annoying. Stuff like Gerrit and phabricator enforce reviews by making you review individual commits / changes / whatever you want to call them and not branch diffs.
… which is part of why they aren’t using GitHubs pull request feature to land changes?
“at this time”
Meaning they’re planning/considering to in the future.
That is not what that means
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I’m only a native English speaker, so guess I could be interpreting it wrong.
You should try being a native English reader.
What it means is “they will not be accepting pull requests at this time.” Whether or not they are open to changing this in the future is not specified. They have not specifically stated that this is off the table, nor have they stated this is their intent.
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No. They’re just not publicly saying it’s off the table. Whether they’re entertaining it internally is a totally different question.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I wonder if the same is going to be true of Thunderbird. Thunderbird actually requires you use Mercurial to contribute at all, rather than managing both git and Mercurial.
That being said…it’s kind of odd to me how swiftly Mozilla of all companies/orgs is to embrace a code forge hosted by Microsoft for their main software. Surreal, even.
Mozilla being Mozilla, I’d guess. They should have gone sel-hosted with sourcehut, or at least gitlab. Or if not self-hosted, the choice should have been at the least gitlab or better, given it allows to chose DCO over CLA. But perhaps not everyone cares… I remember when gitlab introduced DCO, and how that helped debian and gnome to migrate to gitlab. After allowing DCO, other projects migrated as well.
I’m not that fan of gitlab, and I’d prefer sourcehut for open source projects, but if wanting something closer to github, then gitlab might be the answer. But Mozilla is a corp, maybe they don’t care much about these things, and as a corp, perhaps they were looking for CLA sort of contribution any ways…
I also think gitlab hosted by Mozilla Foundation would have been a better solution than github.
Mozilla Corporation is owned by the Mozilla Foundation, so their incentives aren’t that of a corporation but a non-profit.
Wtf is wrong with gitlab…
Nothing, it works fine.
Then why didn’t Firefox use their power to support a git that’s not owned by Microsoft?
I don’t know. Because they are not angry with Microsoft anymore and github better fits their workflow?
- 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
Whyyyyy? Why github?
Reviewing PRs costs money/time
Edit: added “Why github?”
Fair point. I would say on a personal level that GitHub actions is quite nice to use, especially with the marketplace. But I’d be surprised if switching version controls also entailed a CI/CD change for Mozilla, so I can’t think of a good reason.
Dang, I was really hoping that they would stop using bugzilla and switch to something like GitHub/GitLab/Gitea issues instead. Perhaps also put things like feature requests there as well and have one place to contribute to Firefox
I’m amazed people are still using Mercurial. I worked on a few hg projects about a decade ago and it wasn’t a very good experience. It was easy for people who used subversion, but if you were even halfway familiar with git you just missed a lot of functionality.
