On 16 September 2015 at 18:32, Jonathan Wakely <jwakely....@gmail.com> wrote: > On 16 September 2015 at 17:20, Manuel López-Ibáñez wrote: >> My impression is that right now one can develop GCC with GIT or SVN (people >> are submitting GIT patches all the time). After the conversion, only GIT >> will be possible. Does this actually lower the entry barrier and will >> attract contributors? > > Yes, I think so. "The kids" these days all want to use git, not svn. > That's harder to do because you have to set up git *and* git-svn.
That must mean I'm not a kid anymore. How sad! Now seriously, I admittedly have no idea how complex is to setup git-svn. Couldn't we simplify this somehow? I have no exact numbers to give you, but around 10-15 potential contributors contacted me after the "Why not contribute?" post some time ago. The number one complain was the difficulty to set-up bootstrap+regression testing. The second one was the copyright assignment, which I told them to basically forget at the beginning, because it is not needed for small patches. Despite this, at least one of them stopped for fear that he will not get the copyright disclaimer from his boss and his work will got to waste. The few ones that managed to submit a patch, had a hard time following them up. Most people complained about lack of time. It takes a lot of time to get to the point where one can submit their first patch (even if you have a patch to start with). Not one single person ever mentioned SVN or GIT. >> Wouldn't all this effort be better spent in getting finally rid of CVS for >> wwwdocs! If there was a SVN repository for wwwdocs, there could also be a >> GIT mirror! Using GIT to commit to wwwdocs, wouldn't that be cool! > > Nice try ;-) One must not lose hope ;-) Perhaps when CVS reaches 10 years being unmaintained... only three to go. Cheers, Manuel.
