OpenOffice.org development switches to Mercurial

ANNOUNCEMENT
============

OpenOffice.org developers,

I'm very pleased to announce, that after five months of piloting, 
implementation and and testing, we are finally ready to switch 
OpenOffice.org development to Mercurial (hg) as our SCM (Source Code 
Management) tool.

Mercurial is a modern and flexible distributed SCM tool with the fast 
and convenient merging capability which is so required for OOo development.

We have chosen Mercurial out of the three major open source DSCM tools 
available (Git, Bazaar and Mercurial) because we believe that its 
combination of ease of use, flexibility and performance fits best with 
the overall OOo needs. We are well aware that a slightly different 
emphasis on the selection criteria might well have led to a choice of 
Git or Bazaar, which are both very capable DSCMs as well.

Details:

We'll switch the DEV300 development code line first, the OOO320 
(OpenOffice.org 3.2 release code line) will follow later. We certainly 
don't want to interfere with the OOo 3.2 release.

The DEV300 switch will happen around the 26th of October. The current 
DEV300 hg mirror repository on hg.services.openoffice.org will be 
elevated to *the* reference repository, where release engineering pushes 
released milestones. Simultaneously release engineering will stop to 
commit new milestones to the current Subversion (svn) trunk.

Please stay tuned!

During the course of the next two weeks I'll make a number of 
announcements regarding the switch to Mercurial:
- where to find documentation
- which will be the last svn based milestone
- conversion of child workspaces to hg
- conventions which we will use

Regards
    Heiner


--
Jens-Heiner Rechtien
OpenOffice.org release engineer
hr@openoffice.org
jens-heiner.rechtien@sun.com