I think that it would be a suitable point in time to switch to a new version control system right after the 1.1 release. The first question to ask is of course why we should switch at all. While the distributed version control systems allow a workflow where people maintan their own repositories and there is a designated role of integrator, I don't think we need such a workflow at this point in time. It may very well be the model to use in the future, when we have a production usable system, but right now this feature has no direct appeal. The compelling reason to switch is in my opinion the superior support for branches that the DVCS's provide. Creating a branch is a very cheap operation and merging it to the trunk or whatever branch is far superior to what SVN provides. I think this feature would change the way we are working and improve our productivity by a significant factor. There are a few other arguments in favour of a switch. People working through GPRS and off-line would have an easier time handling branches and updates. It would be possible to do sprints without a working internet access. There are, in my opinion, 3 viable choices of DVCS for PyPy: - git - hg (mercurial) - bzr I think they would all be an improvement over SVN and they all have their strengths and weaknesses. In favour of bzr and hg is the fact that they are written in Python, with core parts in C. Git is all C. Git currently requires a cygwin environment to run on Windows, hg and bzr appear to have native windows versions. Git is the fastest of the lot with hg in second place. Bzr is still a fair bit slower, though this is being worked on. Hg is really good at keeping the repositories small, with git in second place. Speaking for bzr is the fact that we have Michael Hudson in the PyPy community, and he seems to be a guru on bzr by now. Hg seems to be a little more tedious in its command set than the other two. Git used to be rather obscure, but is these days very straight forward to use. Git and bzr have very good visualization tools for showing the splitting and merging of branches. Git seems to be best at showing exactly what changed between 2 versions of the code (even 2 versions that are not on the same subtree). The strongest argument in favour of git seems to me to be the rebase feature, which allows one to make a branch for a new feature, work on the branch and then update the base of the branch to branch off at a later point in time. I haven't identified this feature in hg and bzr, but then I haven't read all the documentation in detail. The one feature of svn that we would miss is the inclusion of foreign version controlled trees, like we do with the pylib tree. We would have to do this in a different way than before, since none of the systems have this feature. I'm not sure it makes sense to have the close svn coupling between the projects any more, in any case. The effort of learning any of the systems seems to be quite insignificant. getting up to the level of svn is a matter of 15 minutes and learning the whole range of commands in a tool is not a big effort. There is of course the hooks that send mail and blurb in IRC, but all 3 systems seem to have at least as powerful hooks as svn. Jacob