On Apr 16, 2010, at 7:22 PM, ext Tim Schaub wrote: > Hey- > > In advance of our infrastructure meeting (time TBD), I thought I'd > take > a poll for the heck of it. > > Would people be in favor of or opposed to moving the OpenLayers > repository to GitHub?
(I'm going to respond in general re: DVCSes here -- if we were to go with Git, I would personally prefer to go to OSGeo and get Git + Trac set up there, than to migrate to GitHub.) I feel that moving to GitHub decentralizes community, and (similar to a wiki for documentation) causes users to feel 'unconnected' with a mainline management of the code. In many cases, I have felt that the only reason that contributors have worked to contribute their changes back to OpenLayers is because of the 'cost of forking' -- creating a fork takes time and effort, and not doing so is easier than doing so. As a result, they are required to participate in the community, and in doing so they have a positive effect on the whole community. By making forking 'easy', we encourage developers to live in their own world, with low cost to them, and low incentive to contribute back to the community. In general, I have found that maintaining an SVN repository synced using Git has not been so extraordinarily difficult that it's a major problem; it is still a cost, but a reasonably low one. I realize that this is mostly a selfish point of view, but I fear making it easy for organizations to fork, whether it be big or small. THe motivation to contribute back to OpenLayers is reasonably small already, due to the turnaround time on OpenLayers mainline commits; moving to Git to me feels like simply giving up. Our development model (with sandboxes) has generally provided an open way for non-committers to have in-SVN access; although we don't use these tools much, I think that in general, we could use these much more like git. (For example, making everyone who has a trac account able to create a sandbox -- something that I've wanted to set up, but not made the time for yet.) The merging story with SVN has improved with each release, to the point that it is now practical to use SVN merge in a way similar to git's merging process. Merging patches could be done via svn merge, maintaining history, rather than via the somewhat clunky patch-review system we currently have, if we were comfortable with a 'looser' mainline branch. There are some positive effects to be had by having code available in a DVCS, but I feel that they are mostly to consumers of the OpenLayers project, and especially those who would rather maintain their own copy than contribute back to trunk. Following that path to me feels very much like 'giving up' on the mainline development of OpenLayers; I would rather find flaws and improve the current way we do things than go the route of moving to Git. > If we go with GitHub, we may or may not want to use their issue > tracker. > This is a separate topic for discussion (the github-trac plugin can > allow some integration of Trac and GitHub). Just for the record, there have been several discussions of providing Git or mercurial via OSGeo infrastructure. If OpenLayers were to desire to make this change, I would make it a priority to do this on OSGeo infrastructure if the community so-desired. > I'm interested mainly to hear if people are generally in favor or > opposed to the idea of a repository move - and a move specifically to > GitHub for hosting. I am not in favor of moving to Git, and if we were to move, I would rather move to OSGeo than to GitHub. Best Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Nokia _______________________________________________ Dev mailing list Dev@openlayers.org http://openlayers.org/mailman/listinfo/dev
