Forums / Cotonti / Development / Server and source control update in May

I'd like to announce 2 important changes on the technical side of our project in May. The first one: we are going to move to another server. We have a backup server too, so the migration will be easy.

The second thing: we are going to move our code repositories from Subversion to Mercurial. I strongly propose this for the following reasons:

1. With SVN our repo grows by nearly 25 MB with every new release tag. Mercurial has a smarter tagging system, so the repository will be more compact.
2. Modules, plugins, langpacks and themes will be moved to separate repositories. This is important because we are going to give write access on them to 3rd party developers.
3. It's easier to maintain sites with Mercurial because you can update files with it directly and it stores all of its files in one directory which won't mess with other folders.
4. Branches and merges are a lot easier with Mercurial. This is not very important for Cotonti due to its centralized development model, but just in case.

Added 2 weeks later:

We have successfully moved to a new server now that the site runs 4 times faster than before. The next step is moving from Subversion to Mercurial. We are moving to Mercurial repositories provided by Google Code Hosting rather than our own server for better security and robustness. We will continue using Trac for project management and issue tracking.

Now I would like to ask all the Cotonti Team members and contributors to register at Google Code Hosting (usually just a normal Google account works there) and send me via PM their account details (usually Name Surname <login@host.tld>) so that I can add them to the project and keep their credits while converting repository history. Then the conversion will be made and I will give more instructions on using new repositories.

Added 4 days later:

We have paused the migration to Mercurial until July. Current Trac + SVN system is stable, if we have an unstable toolset I probably won't have time to fix it until July. We are also considering migration to Github instead of Trac + SVN, but this is not yet possible until some technical issues are solved anyways.

Added 1 month later:

We have solved technical problems and are going to migrate to Github soon (right after 0.9.3 release). Source code management will be switched from Subversion to Git, issue and project tracking will be done entirely in Github. Existing Trac tickets will be ported to Github.

I apologize but developers will need to register on Github and send me their account names once again before the conversion is done. Sorry!

Github has Compare View, as for diff downloads, these can be generated with Git itself.