----- Original Message ----
> From: Eric Evans <eev...@rackspace.com>
> To: community@apache.org
> Sent: Wed, September 15, 2010 10:18:46 AM
> Subject: Re: "Forking is a Feature" reactions?
>
> On Wed, 2010-09-15 at 08:04 +0200, Dirk-Willem van Gulik wrote:
> > Especially as the pattern seems to be conductive to personal
> > gratification** more than community; and leads to patchcollections
> > which are the work of love of a single person quite easily. And that
> > seems to cause fragmentation on an end to end level. I.e. rather than
> > scratching your own itch - and solving it at a product level - you
> > create a small alternate reality in which you nullify the issue, in
> > which you isolate - and then welcome people on your island - but
> > you've not made the world a slightly easier place. Somehow it feels as
> > if there is some driver lacking, some positive need to have
> > communities collaborate.
>
> I believe you have this backward; distributed version control systems
> are more conducive to community than their centralized counterparts.
>
> With a centralized vcs, a select group of privileged individuals are
> given access, they are the gate keepers.
Eh, no. That's exactly how Linux works, with people having protective attitudes
towards their own trees: git only makes that mode of working easier. Here a
committer's job is to *facilitate* inclusive work, not prevent it.
> Everyone else gets a "working
> copy" and is expected to create a patch (or patches) and then work to
> convince a committer to apply them.
That's not the Apache model, fwiw. Collaboration means you work as equals,
committer status or not.
> A distributed version control system is a measure toward eliminating
> that have/have not distinction; it reduces the barrier to contribution.
No it doesn't. The learning curve alone is a barrier to its adoption.
It just means you have the same access to the history as anyone else,
and can develop on branches with far greater ease. Github is the great
new thing here, not git itself. If github were open source we'd probably
be using it at Apache already in some form.
> Instead of a working copy you get a full working repository.
> Contributors can have long running branches where they work on large
> features while easily keeping in sync with upstream changes. And when
> the contributor repos are public, others can follow their progress and
> provide feedback and collaborate.
>
> If useful changesets that are languishing in random repositories and are
> not making it upstream, that is a social problem, not a technical one.
Yes, but that just begs the point: this thread is about the social implications
of the choice of vc tool, and the aforementioned author of the blog post
seems to think forking in all its forms is a good idea for societies.
Somehow I doubt that's the case.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: community-unsubscr...@apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: community-h...@apache.org
