On Monday, 5 January 2015 22:22:19 CEST, Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
Usually, half-way through they ask me, why doesn't KDE use github
I do not understand how stuff would change if we used GitHub, though. There would still be that huge gap of not understanding which of the repos to use. I think that this is easy to solve with individual apps, but it's a hard problem when it comes to a platform, or indeed to an environment where the border between the individual pieces is unclear (e.g. which repo contains the plasma clock applet in KDE4, and where is it found in plasma5)? I do not have an answer on how to make this more obvious or beginner friendly.
The contributors still have to know what a DVCS is, and have to understand the concept of a commit and what a push means. But all of that applies to GitHub as well.
About the only difference that I can see are GitHub's pull requests. I understand that the knowledge of how to create a PR there is pretty widespread among our contributors. The fact that ReviewBoard doesn't allow actual approval (i.e. where it's approved *and* merged into our SCM) doesn't help here at all, that's also true.
I would encourage you to read https://techbase.kde.org/Development/Gerrit#Getting_Started . Do you think that the workflow proposed there is reasonably beginner-friendly?
We can then discuss ways in which it can be simplified. E.g. the need to set up an extra remote can go away easily *if* we agree on directing pushes to Gerrit once (and if) it's adopted. A website listing all projects can easily show a copy-pasteable link on how to clone and get the change-id hook in place during the initial clone, etc. We can add some scripting to sync SSH keys from LDAP to Gerrit, so that people only have to register with Identity and they'll be all set. That all is possible.
What I'm saying here is that I believe that the feature set supported by Gerrit is actually very close to that of GitHub. It's "different" because there's no "fork me" button and the concepts do not map 1:1 to each other, but the general ideas are very similar.
Cheers, Jan -- Trojitá, a fast Qt IMAP e-mail client -- http://trojita.flaska.net/
