New QGIS code repository
What has been talked about for a long time has happened. The QGIS project has officially changed its version control system: the code has been moved from SVN to GIT. The migration process is described in detail in Tim’s blog.
This is the second global migration. A few years ago, we migrated from CVS to SVN, and that was accompanied by the migration of the repository and bugtracker from SourceForge to the OSGeo infrastructure. The current migration is even more global: in addition to the migration to GIT, we have a repository migration to GitHub (more on that below), a bug tracker change (Trac will be replaced by Redmine), and we will also create a new plugin repository integrated with the bug tracker.
The new official repository is on GitHub — qgis/QGIS. As git is a distributed version control system, access to the main repository will be restricted to a few developers (i.e., many developers who previously had access will lose it). Everyone else can work in their own repositories and either submit patches (created using git format-patch) or send a pull request (if your repository is also on GitHub).
Now a bit of grumbling. The move to Git is a good step, but I personally don’t like the fact that the official repository is on GitHub. I don’t understand why the repository can’t be on the OSGeo servers. The rest of the infrastructure will be there anyway, so everything will be interconnected, and a single login will be used to access all services (bugtracker, svn, ftp…). Now it is not very convenient, and there is also a dependency on a third party.
P.S.: despite the fact that version 1.7 has already been branched, the release will be delayed until the end of the project’s infrastructure update. The release branch is accepting fixes that do not affect strings, and package maintainers can already prepare test builds and make the necessary changes.