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.
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.
I would love to see the Mozzilla foundation double down on ActivityPub and host a Forgejo instance or work with Codeberg for hosting.
I wonder how much Github being the primary place for FOSS source code limits people around the world from joining the movement.
I’d also like to see an open platform for their source code, but Github is undeniably the preferred platform for most developers, so I understand Mozilla’s decision.
So long as only the source code is hosted on Github I don’t think it limits people to contribute. Bugs and features are still tracked with the existing tools.