This is an attempt at answering something raised be Gilles in a different thread. I'm afraid it is getting longer than I intended. Something seems to need to get out. Sorry.
On 2020-07-23, Gilles Sadowski wrote: > I missed the turn where this project's PMC decided that we must > be present on GH in order to continue what some of us have been > doing for more than 10 years. The project decided to set up github mirrors and with the exposure to github you get the rest of the package. I don't remember whether we had an explicit vote about enabling github mirrors, much less whether it has been a component by component decision. Putting aside what I think about github as a company one thing that I have observed with projects migrating to github across the board is it seems to lower the barrier for new contributors. This results in two things: (1) you get more contributions and (2) the contributors usually don't stick around, most contributions are drive-by one-off contributions. Gilles, I believe you have seen an uptick in contributions to the sevaral maths components even if you don't like they way they have happened. > There is a trend to make GH central to the development process > (marginalizing "dev@" and JIRA and colonizing "issues@"). This is troubling me as well. Where "this" is that using github PRs seems to keep the potential future committers away from the dev list and they never become part of a component's community. We do get more contributions anf the quality of the codebases likely improves because of this, but I feel it makes the community weaker. Discussions only rarely happen "here" nowadays. There are a few people like Gary, Rob and a few others who manage to devote time across almost all components and I adore them for that. And we need them because most of the components wouldn't stand a chance to get a release vote through without them. Our component communities have become too small to sustain themselves and at the same time some of them see more commits than they used to have in "the good old days" with many people active on this list. I haven't got an answer to this. [Sidenote: In the early 90s I contributed to my first open source project before CVS had a network protocol. I can not understand why having to checkout a SCM repository, creating a patch and sending it to somebody else is a burden that keeps people from contributing. I have learnt to accept this as a fact. There are lots of facts I cannot explain. And yes, I know I sound old. I am :-)] Stefan --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@commons.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@commons.apache.org
