GCC Aiming To Switch From SVN To Git Over The Holidays
The GCC compiler is still based on SVN (started in 1988) and the developers are planning to move to Git — Eric S. Raymond chose to take on this task last year but he hit a few roadblocks on his way.
RAM was “hideously expensive” in 2018 but even though multiple people chipped in to fund the RAM upgrade that was supposedly needed to finish the task, a year later the progress is still stalling.
Going from Python to Go didn’t make things easier as ESR believed.
Meanwhile Maxim Kuvyrkov supplied patches to the existing svn-git solution and created a Git repository with it: https://github.com/maxim-kuvyrkov/gcc
ESR doesn’t trust svn-git, though.
It’s going to be interesting to see which solution will prevail over the holidays and hopefully a consensus will be reached without any further drama in the mailing lists.
Interestingly, the proposal to switch from SVN to Git has been formulated much earlier than 2017/18: In 2015 Jason Merrill talked up the conversion idea and got the discussion going.
Update (December, 24th): While originally planned as a holiday project and scheduled to be finished until the new year, the conversion of the GCC SVN code to Git is still not quite there yet. As Eric S. Raymond explained today on the mailing list, the reposurgeon scripts should be feature-complete “for a full and correct GCC conversion”.
