WebKit 專案將從 Subversion 搬到 GitHub 上

Hacker News 首頁上看到 WebKit 專案宣佈從本來的 Subversion 搬到 GitHub 上:「WebKit on GitHub!」,新的專案位置在 WebKit/WebKit 這邊。對應的討論在「WebKit Migrates from Subversion to GitHub (webkit.org)」這邊。

但 issue tracking system 的部份目前看起來還是繼續用 WebKit Bugzilla,沒有開 GitHub 的 issue 功能,但至少是從 Subversion 換成 Git 了。

在 Hacker News 上的討論意外看到已經是歷史的 SVK (試著在 Subversion 上面堆一些功能),而且還聊到了一些 tricky 的技巧:

Funny story: my first task when I joined the original iPhone team was to merge our forked WebKit with master. It was a sort of hazing ritual slash "when else would we do it but when someone new joins?". Anyways, we used a tool called SVK[1] in order to get very primitive "git-like" abilities. It was basically a bunch of scripts that used SVN under the hood. For example, in order to get the "local everything"-style behaviors of git, the very first thing it did was checkout every single version of the repository in question. For WebKit, this meant that the first day was spent leaving the computer alone and letting it download for hours. I made the mistake of having a space somewhere in the path of the target folder, which broke something or other, so I ended up having to do it all over again.

Anyways, I distinctly remember one of the instructions for merging WebKit in our internal wiki being something like "now type `svk merge`, but hit ctrl-c immediately after! You don't want to use the built-in merge, it'll break everything, but this is the only way to get a magic number that you can find stored in [some file] after the merge has started. If it's not there, try `svk merge` again and let it go a little longer than last time." A few hires later (I think possibly a year after) someone set up a git mirror internally to avoid having to do this craziness, which if I remember correctly, was treated with some skepticism. This was 2007, so why would we try some new-fangled git thing when we had svk?

1. https://wiki.c2.com/?SvkVersionControl

我記得那個時間點 VCS 的選擇的確是個有趣的決策過程... 除了 Git 以外還有 Mercurial,另外還有幾個當時就已經算小眾的 open source solution。

而到了 2010 後就比較明朗了,現在幾乎是 Git 一統天下了,Mercurial 目前最大的使用者應該是 Meta (Facebook)?