FreeBSD needs Git to ensure repo integrity [was: 2012 incident]

[Nathan Whitehorn]

On 11/18/12 01:31, Konstantin Belousov wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 11:05:40PM -0800, Perry Hutchison wrote:
>> [trimmed some of the lists]
>>
>> Chris Rees <utisoft at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> ... git doesn't work with our workflow.
>> I'm sure the workflow itself is documented somewhere, but is
>> there a good writeup of _how_ git doesn't work with it, e.g. what
>> capabilit{y,ies} is/are missing?  Seems this might be of interest
>> to the git developers, not because they necessarily want to support
>> FreeBSD as such, but as an example of a real-world workflow that git
>> currently does not handle well.
> Git would work well with our workflow. It supports the centralized
> repository model, which the project employs right now.
>
> The biggest issues, assuming the project indeed decides to move to Git
> right now, are the migration costs, both in the term of the technical
> efforts needed, and the learning curve for the most population of the
> committers.
>
> Relatively minor problem, at least with the current rate of the commits,
> would be a commit race, when the shared repo head forwarded due to the
> parallel commit. The issue should be somewhat mitigated by the Git
> allowance to push a set of changes in one push.

git would be a huge step backward from svn for the central repo in lots 
of ways. Besides being (in my experience) extremely fragile and 
error-prone and the issues of workflow that have been brought up, the 
loss of monotonic revision numbers is a really major problem. Switching 
SCMs as a result of a security problem is also an action totally 
disproportionate with the issue that should not be made in a panic. 
Having more [cryptographic] verifiability in the release process is a 
good thing; it is not strictly related to the choice of version control 
system.
-Nathan