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jgraham ◴[] No.43970574[source]
(I work at Mozilla, but not on the VCS tooling, or this transition)

To give a bit of additional context here, since the link doesn't have any:

The Firefox code has indeed recently moved from having its canonical home on mercurial at hg.mozilla.org to GitHub. This only affects the code; bugzilla is still being used for issue tracking, phabricator for code review and landing, and our taskcluster system for CI.

In the short term the mercurial servers still exist, and are synced from GitHub. That allows automated systems to transfer to the git backend over time rather than all at once. Mercurial is also still being used for the "try" repository (where you push to run CI on WIP patches), although it's increasingly behind an abstraction layer; that will also migrate later.

For people familiar with the old repos, "mozilla-central" is mapped onto the more standard branch name "main", and "autoland" is a branch called "autoland".

It's also true that it's been possible to contribute to Firefox exclusively using git for a long time, although you had to install the "git cinnabar" extension. The choice between the learning hg and using git+extension was a it of an impediment for many new contributors, who most often knew git and not mercurial. Now that choice is no longer necessary. Glandium, who wrote git cinnabar, wrote extensively at the time this migration was first announced about the history of VCS at Mozilla, and gave a little more context on the reasons for the migration [1].

So in the short term the differences from the point of view of contributors are minimal: using stock git is now the default and expected workflow, but apart from that not much else has changed. There may or may not eventually be support for GitHub-based workflows (i.e. PRs) but that is explicitly not part of this change.

On the backend, once the migration is complete, Mozilla will spend less time hosting its own VCS infrastructure, which turns out to be a significant challenge at the scale, performance and availability needed for such a large project.

[1] https://glandium.org/blog/?p=4346

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iamcreasy ◴[] No.43970669[source]
Thanks for the added context.

If I may - what were the significant scale challenges for self hosted solution?

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bayindirh ◴[] No.43970862[source]
I guess it's the CI/CD infrastructure. Pipeline and time requirement grows exponentially as the code supports more operating systems and configurations.

I used a GitLab + GitLab Runner (docker) pipeline for my Ph.D. project which did some verification after every push (since the code was scientific), and even that took 10 minutes to complete even if it was pretty basic. Debian's some packages need more than three hours in their own CI/CD pipeline.

Something like Mozilla Firefox, which is tested against regressions, performance, etc. (see https://www.arewefastyet.com) needs serious infrastructure and compute time to build in n different configurations (stable / testing / nightly + all the operating systems it supports) and then test at that scale. This needs essentially a server farm, to complete in reasonable time.

An infrastructure of that size needs at least two competent people to keep it connected to all relevant cogs and running at full performance, too.

So yes, it's a significant effort.

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arp242 ◴[] No.43970919[source]
> I guess it's the CI/CD infrastructure

Your guess is wrong as Firefox doesn't use GitHub for any of that, and AFAIK there are no plans to either.

The blog post linked in the top comment goes in to this in some detail, but in brief: git log, clone, diff, showing files, blame, etc. is CPU expensive. You can see this locally on large repo if you try something like "git log path/to/dir".

Add to this all the standard requirements of running any server that needs to be 1) fast, and 2) highly available.

And why bother when there's a free service available for you?

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bayindirh ◴[] No.43970931[source]
It was a guess and I never claimed it was 100% correct, and I'm happy to stand corrected. No hard feelings there.
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tempaccount420 ◴[] No.43971183[source]
"I guess..." != "I'm guessing..."
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1. bayindirh ◴[] No.43971406[source]
That's new to me. Can you expand on that a little?