Call for Discussion: New Project: Skara -- investigating source code management options for the JDK sources

Hello, The source code management (SCM) system of a software project is a fundamental piece of its infrastructure and workflows. Starting in February 2008, the source code of different JDK releases and supporting projects has been hosted in Mercurial repositories under http://hg.openjdk.java.net/. Code reviews of JDK changes are typically conducted as discussions in mailing lists over small patches sent to one or more lists or over webrevs hosted on cr.openjdk.java.net. Since 2008, many open source projects have successfully adopted more efficient SCM and review tooling, in some cases provided by third parties. In order to help OpenJDK contributors be more productive, both seasoned committers and relative newcomers, the Skara project proposes to investigate alternative SCM and code review options for the JDK source code, including options based upon Git rather than Mercurial, and including options hosted by third parties. The Skara project intends to build prototypes of hosting the JDK 12 sources under different providers. The evaluation criteria to consider include but are not limited to: * Performance: time for clone operations from master repos, time of local operations, etc. * Space efficiency * Usability in different geographies * Support for common development environments such as Linux, Mac, and Windows * Able to easily host the entire history of the JDK and the projected growth of its history over the next decade * Support for general JDK code review practices * Programmatic APIs to enable process assistance and automation of review and processes If one or more prototypes indicate a different SCM arrangement offers substantial improvements over the current situation, the Skara project will shepherd a JEP to change the SCM for the JDK. I propose to lead the project with the initial reviewers including but not limited to Tim Bell (tbell), Erik Duveblad (ehelin), Erik Joelsson (erikj), Tiep Vo (tiep), Tony Squier (squierts), and Robin Westberg (rwestberg). We suggest the build group sponsor this work. Changing the bug tracking system is out of scope for this project and is *not* under consideration. Comments? Cheers, -Joe