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.
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
It’s the most widely used platform that the most people are familiar with that they get to use likely for free. Newer projects of theirs are also hosted there. Why would you say it makes no sense?
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
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
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...
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.
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.
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
It’s rather bold of many of the commenters in this thread to assume they know the needs of Mozilla and their developers rather than those people themselves. GitHub makes complete sense, even if it doesn’t live up to some people’s desires for free software purity.
I wonder if they'll consider Codeberg as their future Git host of choice. GitHub is less than ideal in terms of digital sovereignty, GitLab also has some questionable leadership. Codeberg seems like the most solid alternative to these so far.
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