by thefilmore on 5/13/25, 5:23 AM with 466 comments
by jgraham on 5/13/25, 7:56 AM
To give a bit of additional context here, since the link doesn't have any:
The Firefox code has indeed recently moved from having its canonical home on mercurial at hg.mozilla.org to GitHub. This only affects the code; bugzilla is still being used for issue tracking, phabricator for code review and landing, and our taskcluster system for CI.
In the short term the mercurial servers still exist, and are synced from GitHub. That allows automated systems to transfer to the git backend over time rather than all at once. Mercurial is also still being used for the "try" repository (where you push to run CI on WIP patches), although it's increasingly behind an abstraction layer; that will also migrate later.
For people familiar with the old repos, "mozilla-central" is mapped onto the more standard branch name "main", and "autoland" is a branch called "autoland".
It's also true that it's been possible to contribute to Firefox exclusively using git for a long time, although you had to install the "git cinnabar" extension. The choice between the learning hg and using git+extension was a it of an impediment for many new contributors, who most often knew git and not mercurial. Now that choice is no longer necessary. Glandium, who wrote git cinnabar, wrote extensively at the time this migration was first announced about the history of VCS at Mozilla, and gave a little more context on the reasons for the migration [1].
So in the short term the differences from the point of view of contributors are minimal: using stock git is now the default and expected workflow, but apart from that not much else has changed. There may or may not eventually be support for GitHub-based workflows (i.e. PRs) but that is explicitly not part of this change.
On the backend, once the migration is complete, Mozilla will spend less time hosting its own VCS infrastructure, which turns out to be a significant challenge at the scale, performance and availability needed for such a large project.
by floriangosse on 5/13/25, 6:55 AM
I think you can dislike the general move to a service like GitHub instead of GitLab (or something else). But I think we all benefit from the fact that Firefox's development continues and that we have a competing engine on the market.
by Kuinox on 5/13/25, 7:40 AM
Their docs was also a mess back then and made me recompile everything even if it wasnt needed.
by antalis on 5/13/25, 7:02 AM
Now, both the desktop and the mobile version will be on Github, and the "issues" will stay on Bugzilla.
This will take advantage of both GitHub's good search and source browsing and Git's familiar system.
As a former Firefox and Thunderbird contributor, I have to say that I used local search instead of trying to find something on the mozilla-central website.
Of course, when you're actively developing software, you search inside your IDE, but allowing to find things easily on the website makes it more welcoming for potential new contributors.
by mritzmann on 5/13/25, 7:29 AM
https://github.com/torvalds/linux
// EDIT: Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43970574
by upcoming-sesame on 5/13/25, 12:14 PM
by noobermin on 5/13/25, 12:24 PM
EDIT: skimming these comments, I like how none of the top comments are talking about the bigger story here which is the move away from mercurial to git and instead everyone is focusing on github itself. This has essentially sealed hg away to obscurity forever. Do people not realise git is a program that runs on your computer and github is just a service that uses git? May be this is an old man gripe at this point but I'm surprised at the lack of technical discussion around this.
by mlenz on 5/13/25, 5:44 AM
by zajio1am on 5/13/25, 10:53 AM
by nolok on 5/13/25, 10:56 AM
by thrdbndndn on 5/13/25, 6:18 AM
Now it has "main" and "autoland", what are they? Which one is the equivalent of mozilla-central before?
by CorrectHorseBat on 5/13/25, 5:48 AM
by tgsovlerkhgsel on 5/13/25, 7:08 AM
On the other hand, the plethora of different self-hosted platforms with limited feature sets is a huge pain. Just finding the repo is often a frustrating exercise, and then trying to view, or worse, search the code without checking it out is often even more frustrating or straight out impossible.
by mintplant on 5/13/25, 10:28 AM
by elmer007 on 5/13/25, 2:09 PM
Fun to get a glimpse into someone's thought process while they were working.
by bingemaker on 5/13/25, 9:31 AM
by upcoming-sesame on 5/13/25, 12:15 PM
by kidsil on 5/14/25, 9:55 AM
Hard to believe it's been 27 years. I remember when it was still in beta, and how exciting it was to have an open source alternative to Internet Explorer.
Good times!
by reddalo on 5/13/25, 5:56 AM
by rvz on 5/13/25, 7:12 AM
by bandrami on 5/13/25, 6:03 AM
by edelbitter on 5/13/25, 9:15 AM
by thund on 5/13/25, 3:38 PM
by metalliqaz on 5/13/25, 3:58 PM
by octocop on 5/13/25, 7:29 AM
by sylware on 5/13/25, 10:38 AM
github.com broke noscript/basic (x)html interop for most if not all core functions (which were working before). The issue system was broken not that long time ago.
And one of the projects which should worry about, even enforce, such interop, moving to microsoft github...
The internet world is a wild toxic beast.
by cubefox on 5/13/25, 10:15 AM
by DennisL123 on 5/13/25, 6:48 AM
by nikolayasdf123 on 5/13/25, 9:47 AM
by roschdal on 5/13/25, 9:11 AM
by IshKebab on 5/13/25, 6:10 AM
by InTheArena on 5/13/25, 5:17 PM
by mhh__ on 5/13/25, 6:40 AM
by mentalgear on 5/13/25, 6:55 AM
by kristel100 on 5/13/25, 8:20 AM
by petepete on 5/13/25, 7:21 AM