[Cabal] The VCS situation

[Daniel Atallah]

Ethan and I have been talking a little bit about the VCS situation on pidgin.im.

Hopefully the following is a decent summary the current situation; I'm
sure Ethan will correct whatever I miss or get wrong.

The real issue is that we have two disjointed svn trees right now.
This is problematic because svn is not designed to run in disjointed
trees - the files have no relationship to each other and merging
becomes a nightmare.

There is non-trivial time and effort to make sure that all the commits
to the sf.net svn get into the pidgin.im svn because it is a
completely manual process.  In fact, if we look at the state right
now, I believe that there are a number of changes that haven't made it
to pidgin.im at all.  (If we use a different vcs on pidgin.im, this
could be done automatically.)

The unrelated trees also mean that merging into another vcs is a royal
pain - it looks like we'll have to merge all the changes made in the
pidgin.im tree manually.

If we are going to move to another vcs, we should do so sooner rather
than later to reduce the pain of doing so.

Follow up questions:

Are we going to actually make the move to a different vcs?
- There seemed to be at least a strong interest in doing so not too
long ago - what are the current thoughts.

If so, which one? (At this time, monotone has been the only recent
suggestion - do we have any others?)

-D