[oe] Reconsidering the work flow and how the SCM system fits in

[Holger Freyther]

Hey,

I'm anything but happy with the way we work with our repository. We have a 
dreambox branch that is not mergable due issues with our SCM system, the 
OpenMoko guys have to go back to diffing and applying the diff and merging by 
hand, we just commit fundamental changes like sysroot, packaged-staging, RFCs 
in one go and then do weeks of fixing. And I can continue with this list.

What: I think we should use more branches
	- As many shortlived and medium lived branches as developers want
	- Shared branches for stuff like packaged staging, RFCs, sysroot. Were you
	  start the development, add features, other people will compile their stuff, 
	  other compile and then you rebase and merge!
	- Basicly you develop a feature in a branch until it is ready and not 
	  impacting other things, then you rebase/cleanup, propose it for inclusion 
	  and wait for feedback, then merge.
	- Stable distributions and vendors get their own branch, they can merge, 
	  cherry-pick what ever they want.


The issue:
	- mtn can not merge. Forcing me to manually delete files in one copy to do a 
	  merge is not acceptable.
	- mtn has not the concept of short-lived branches (e.g. deleting their 
	  existence once done), mtn suspend does not work as witnessed by our 
	  automerger.
	- mtn pluck is not making me happy
	- I lack a GUI to easily browse the repository
	- I can not clean up changes before I push them!


I want that we use more branches for development, apply review on them, 
land/merge/push these branches after review, pull peoples changes from other 
hosts, work on perfetch patch series before landing patches. I believe we 
need to deploy this kind of development in OE again and as mtn is the 
obstacle to this kind of development I propose to switch to another SCM 
system that allows us to develop OpenEmbedded the way it should be developed.

My criteria:
	- Should have branches, easy merging, easy merging of merges
	- Branches and merging should be cheap
	- Make it easy to put the OE tree into another SCM and still be able
	  to merge (git-svn and such)
	- A good graphical tool to browse the repository
	- A good and maintained web frontend
	- A good set of builtin tools (e.g. like git-add -i and git-rebase -i)

I think the two options are hg and git, I tend to favor git due the size of 
its community. I want to switch OE to one of these systems by the end of this 
month and start using more branches and creating perfect patch series again.


comments? agreement?

	z.


PS: It is not the speed of mtn, it is the lack of development in areas like 
branches, merging, rebasing, we need to use these in OE!