Hi Andreas,
There is already an OSGeo account on GitHub, managed by SAC members:
https://github.com/OSGeo
This discussion started 6 months ago on IRC, during the OSGeoLive
transition to Git.
Since there was no git.osgeo.org setup at the time, we decided to
temporarily host OSGeoLive git repository there, waiting for an official
OSGeo hosting option. We are still using OSGeo Trac as a ticketing system.
I see the benefits that Andrea mentioned, and I believe that even if the
official OSGeoLive copy moves back to OSGeo infrastructure, we will
probably keep a copy on GitHub for project visibility and for accepting
pull requests... Lets keep in mind that Linux kernel project is doing
exactly the same: they host the kernel code under kernel.org and have a
copy on GitHub as a backup. Actually this kept the kernel work going,
when kernel.org faced some serious downtime 4 years ago:
https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/9/4/92
It is true that GitHub is not Free Software, so IMO we should not be
depending on it. I see the ethical issues that arise from using a non
Free provider and it is not the only case in our ecosystem eg. Transifex
used to be Free Software and it is not anymore:
https://github.com/transifex/transifex/issues/206
https://github.com/tymofij/transifex/pull/1#issuecomment-14206884
Best,
Angelos
On 10/18/2015 10:07 AM, Andreas Hocevar wrote:
Very well said Andrea, and I can back this up with very similar experiences
from when the OpenLayers project moved to Github.
That said, if OSGeo considers setting up a Git infrastructure, please keep an
alternative in mind: pay for an OSGeo Github account for projects that want to
use Git. Will burn some money, but won't burn out volunteers who have to keep
OSGeo's own infrastructure up and running. See https://github.com/locationtech
as an example.
Andreas.
On 18 Oct 2015, at 08:41, Andrea Aime <andrea.a...@geo-solutions.it> wrote:
Hi,
just wanted to chime in saying that if OSGeo starts setting said guidelines,
it should also have some benefits comparison so that projects can
see what they might not get by avoiding Github.
In particular, looking at GeoServer experience from the switch, it's rather
evident we got more people contributing right the moment we did the
switch, here is the contributors per month diagram, the red line
is the date we switched from svn to GitHub:
<Selezione_095.png>
Most of this is due to two factors:
- availability of pull requests (which I believe you can get with other tools
too)
- critical mass on the platform (which arguably you will not get an a OsGeo
hosting)
There is however a downside of that, most of these contributions are "one time
gigs",
people help addressing the particular pitfall concerning them and then they
move on:
github did not change the number of core developers, it just increased a lot the
number of other contributors.
There is another benefit of moving to Github, which is build checks on pull
requests,
we now have Travis (Linux, OSX) building all pull requests and running the test
suite against
them, so we instantly know if the change breaks tests or not, and we planning
on adding
test coverage checks (Coveralls, already used by OpenLayers for example) and
Windows builds
(already used by MapServer for example).
This kind of automation is also rather beneficial to filter our bad
contributions... which is
the dark side of lower contribution barrier, core devs have to spend quite some
time evaluating
pull requests... but ending up with a long queue of them gives a bad impression
about the project
openness. So yeah, another bit to consider I guess, is the project ready to
take on them?
So.... I'm not saying "everybody move to github" but I believe the above should
be
part of the many considerations made when evaluating a move to a different
version control.
Cheers
Andrea
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