Firefox development will fully shift to Git and be hosted on GitHub

The development version control tool of Firefox is shifting from Mercurial to Git to relieve the pressure on its development team.

Mozilla announced the news in a recent email, saying that “For a long time, Firefox desktop development has supported both Mercurial and Git. This dual SCM requirement brings a huge burden to teams that are already at their elbow. We have decided to transfer Firefox development to Git.

According to the introduction, the repository will be hosted on GitHub, but this is expected to take at least six months to start the migration. Once the migration is completed, support for Mercurial will be removed. In the initial stage of migration, Git will become the main version control tool for one-way synchronization with Mercurial. In the second stage, the team will migrate the infrastructure that relies on Mercurial to Git.

Naijatechnews Note: Mercury is an open source distributed code version control tool, mainly written in Python and licensed under the GPL (GNU General Public License) version 2. It was created by Olivia Mackall in 2005 as a replacement for BitKeeper to manage the source code of the Linux kernel to cope with the discontinuation of the free version of BitKeeper.

However, Linus Torvald, the father of Linux, subsequently developed Git for Linux version management, and since then Git has been increasingly used in other projects.