It bothers me that they repeatedly write about a migration "from Mercurial to GitHub", rather than "from Mercurial to Git". It seems to imply that GitHub hosting is the only way to run Git.<p>It's perfectly fine to say that they are moving to GitHub hosting, but not to put it on the same level as Mercurial: Mercurial and Git are applications/protocols, while GitHub is a hosting service. You should compare application with application and hosting service with hosting service.
The problem with consolidating everything on GitHub is that, to me, you're selling your user's and contributor's clicks. Moreover, GitHub blocks indie search crawlers, and as such is just a content silo. Now F/OSS software licenses, at least of the reciprocal kind, make very much a political statement by their license choice, willingly or not, that is questioned by using GitHub (or any other gateway cashing in on user engagement data) as project host. The really ugly and depressing thing is that F/OSS projects seek networking effects on GitHub, turning a super-powerful and easy dSCM into a centralized hub in a heartbeat; to me, they kindof devalue their own (massive) work by trading it for only the attention value it gets on GitHub, and contributing to the oligopolistic web. Hosting GPL software on GitHub is like sticking fingers in your ears, dogmatically adhering to a licensing taxonomy of yesteryear, while refusing to face today's problems. I'm not sure what incentive to go to GitHub is there for a project with a defacto closed group of developers that's been in the works for years or decades already; it's not like the project seeks indie contributors anyway. Might be better to support <a href="https://codeberg.org/" rel="nofollow">https://codeberg.org/</a> .
> Host all OpenJDK Git repositories at <a href="https://github.com/openjdk/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/openjdk/</a>.<p>Good choice from moving to Git [0], very risky move on moving to GitHub. If this was just a mirror then that would be fine but it is moving from Mecurial to Git and then the whole project to GitHub.<p>They should do what Xfce, GNOME and KDE have done and they have self-hosted their own repositories on Gitlab, which GitHub requires the Enterprise Edition for self-hosting. Not really an option, unless you want to pay for this.<p>The risks outweigh the pros for GitHub as I have said before [1] and will say it again. Self-hosting over 'centralising everything' on GitHub.<p>[0] <a href="https://openjdk.java.net/jeps/357" rel="nofollow">https://openjdk.java.net/jeps/357</a><p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23849565" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23849565</a>
YEARS ago at a conference I got really mad at Gosling and told him that Java was going to be Open Source one way or another and that they might as well Open Source it now and maybe SUN wouldn't implode.<p>Well... I was right.
How many applications are left that still use Mercurial? I can only think of two big ones, the JDK and Mozilla's entire code base. Are there still others around? Seems like everyone's moving to Git these days, which is great considering I never did get the hang of Mercurial.
Having worked with multiple Mercurial repositories managed by a custom tool which is now also being converted to Git, I can confirm that the smart choice for a new developer is to choose Git.<p>It’s no longer “Choose Git or Mercurial?” that is the topic, but instead it is which Git branching model to choose.