exactly, they want to keep their karma system. But a github mirror is not unlikely.

Oh, and that's the reason why the mail states that they'll now figure out how to move php-src to git.

There is already a github mirror:

https://github.com/php/php-src

Wonder if they knew about GitHub Organizations?

https://github.com/blog/674-introducing-organizations

This only provides repo level access control. They want ACL's to control down to the branch level.

Think certially and not distributed there :-)

This is handled in projects like the Linux kernel.

Could easily enough have the commitor push to a different repo than he pulls from. Then you could have person manually review pull his changes into manager (like Linus does with Linux).. or if you wanted some automation, have a script import his changes if they match a set of rules.

The other option is submodules.

> Then you could have person manually review pull his changes into manager (like Linus does with Linux)

this assumes that there are enough trusted people in the PHP project with enough time to spend for doing nothing but reviewing pull requests.

> The other option is submodules.

that's a very good idea, especially when you consider how modularized PHP's build system already is. Give them time though. Moving from SVN to git is already a huge step in the right direction, even though the keep most of the old model the same.

Once all of that works nicely, a further step can be to move to submodules.

This sounds like a horribly broken development process to me. Is there any article that explains the idea behind this? I would really like to know how this could work.

Isn't decentralised and ACL is a bit of an oxymoron?

And plain Git can do ACLs? I didn't know that.

I assume you already know this, i.e. the above was sarcasm, but: No, it can't. But since remote access to Git most commonly happens over SSH, ACLs can be implemented by additional tools which serve as the login shell and filter the git commands the client wants to run. The best such tool right now is gitolite, building on concepts established by gitosis. The GitHub-like open source web repo manager Gitorious also implements an ACL system that way.

I was pretty sure, but I never know when I've missed some huge piece of functionality in a program. Thanks for the explanation.

Yep, it can.

Was there any official statement stating that they would switch to GitHub? All I see is that they're switching to git.

no; they aren't moving to github at least right now