I have some deep misgivings about moving to Github. I understand the perceived advantage of more easily accepting contributions from the wider Open Source community, but I think that is more likely to happen with focused tools than with the kind of kitchen-sink project that the DW/LJ codebase has become over the years. Dreamwidth contributors have been people who are highly motivated to add or fix a particular thing because they use and love the site, and I don't see that changing. The lack of tangible results from our last round of participation in GSoC is pretty good proof of that, I think.
I personally have been working on vgifts for almost three years now, using a cloned repository that doesn't require me to deal with rebasing every time I want to compare my work with the newest committed changes. Everything I've read leads me to believe that using Git for that sort of project is a nightmare compared to Mercurial. That doesn't even touch the issue of patch queues, which I don't personally use but I know people who develop primarily on their dreamhack accounts find very useful. I feel we chose the best tool for the job, and I think that's more compelling than chasing the more popular choice. (How many of us use Macs instead of Windows? Windows is still the PC "market winner" but I've barely touched that OS since 1999.)
Anyway, not trying to say "I'm right and you're wrong" here, but I think this needs (a) more discussion and (b) a very cautious, incremental approach if we do transition. One other thing to consider, I expect changing the VCS mid-project like this would make all of our project's development history up to this point more difficult to access going forward, and I find having easy access to that history very helpful in tracking down bugs. I think that covers everything I wanted to mention.
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I personally have been working on vgifts for almost three years now, using a cloned repository that doesn't require me to deal with rebasing every time I want to compare my work with the newest committed changes. Everything I've read leads me to believe that using Git for that sort of project is a nightmare compared to Mercurial. That doesn't even touch the issue of patch queues, which I don't personally use but I know people who develop primarily on their dreamhack accounts find very useful. I feel we chose the best tool for the job, and I think that's more compelling than chasing the more popular choice. (How many of us use Macs instead of Windows? Windows is still the PC "market winner" but I've barely touched that OS since 1999.)
Anyway, not trying to say "I'm right and you're wrong" here, but I think this needs (a) more discussion and (b) a very cautious, incremental approach if we do transition. One other thing to consider, I expect changing the VCS mid-project like this would make all of our project's development history up to this point more difficult to access going forward, and I find having easy access to that history very helpful in tracking down bugs. I think that covers everything I wanted to mention.