It Looks Like GCC's Long-Awaited Git Conversion Could Happen This Weekend

The long in development process of converting GCC's SVN repository to Git for using this modern distributed revision control system for developing the GNU Compiler Collection in the 2020s may finally be complete in the days ahead.

Joseph Myers of CodeSourcery and one of the GCC steering committee members announced that Eric S Raymond's Reposurgeon utility should now be up to the task of converting GCC's SVN repository to Git and doing so the best following a number of last minute improvements.

This follows many months of delays in getting Reposurgeon ready originally delayed due to RAM, bugs, and rewriting the Python code in Golang.

The goal had been to convert GCC to Git over New Year's but Reposurgeon continued being tweaked and there were still debates over whether to use it or one of the alternatives for the SVN-to-Git process.

But now it seems Reposurgeon has been decided upon and the transition could happen this weekend. Myers' planned migration is explained in this mailing list post, "As noted on overseers, once Saturday's DATESTAMP update has run at 00:16 UTC on Saturday, I intend to add a README.MOVED_TO_GIT file on SVN trunk and change the SVN hooks to make SVN readonly, then disable gccadmin's cron jobs that build snapshots and update online documentation until they are ready to run with the git repository. Once the existing git mirror has picked up the last changes I'll make that read-only and disable that cron job as well, and start the conversion process with a view to having the converted repository in place this weekend (it could either be made writable as soon as I think it's ready, or left read-only until people have had time to do any final checks on Monday). Before then, I'll work on hooks, documentation and maintainer-scripts updates."

So in just a few days, barring any other issues or controversies coming up, GCC should finally be utilizing a Git development workflow!