For me, the most appealing reason to switch to git is so that we can get
back to having a single revision control system, but I think the benefit
of that is probably outweighed by the churn. We'd need to rewrite a lot
of stuff simultaneously, more or less.
As for supporting both, I have a hard time forming an opinion on it
without having a clue what the cost would be. Clearly, it would involve
a lot of effort to support git's idiosyncrasies and failure modes (even
if git ends up being better overall for our needs than hg.) What's the
opportunity cost? What would get stalled, postponed, or scrapped? And
what status quo-ish alternative are we talking about, given that we have
to gradually support git in more and more places due to existing usage
and external dependencies?
In short, it's hard to have an opinion about a decision when it's
unclear what the decision means. Is it that git becomes "tier 1" and
anything you cannot do with git that you can do with hg automatically
becomes a blocker? Or is it just a request "please prioritize things
that will improve git support a little higher than you have in the
past"? You've laid out some concrete milestones in your original email,
but I don't know how those milestones would be prioritized relative to
the one or two other little things that releng and IT are working on
already.
On a different gear, would we want to keep m-c/m-i/projects etc. as
separate git repos, or could we make them branches in a merged repo?
Separate repos feel like a mercurial-induced nuisance to me. (I'd prefer
aurora/beta/release to be in the same repo too, not that I truly
understand the repercussions.)
Also, note that a historical weakness of our hg usage has been
onboarding education. Adding git as an alternative would improve this
for people already accustomed to git, but would make the situation worse
for anyone who isn't already comfortable with the more advanced usage of
either git or mercurial. (I assert that nontrivial git is harder to
learn, and we're already not doing a good job with nontrivial hg
education.) It's somewhat tangential, but it would be cool if somebody
could wave a magic wand and address education at the same time -- if
only to prevent a bad situation from becoming worse.
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