[Geany-devel] Git Switch (again)

[Matthew Brush]

On 05/10/11 14:05, Jiří Techet wrote:

> I really have nothing specific against GitHub (actually from what I
> have seen I like it better than Gitorious) and I have no evidence they
> are planning to change their policy. What I wanted to say is that the
> selection of the right VCS hosting site is much less critical decision
> than hosting of the bug tracker. If you decide to change the git
> hosting site for some reason, there's no problem - you push your
> repository there, update a few links and you're done. But this is much
> harder to do with the bug tracker and it should be double-checked it
> satisfies all your needs from all possible perspectives.

Agreed, it's a separate concern to some extent, although if Geany sets 
up shop on GitHub, I don't know why any users would want to suffer 
through the miserable SourceForge interface/search misfeature/email 
unreporting when there's a nice working interface on GH. The one thing 
that could be an issue, and I've yet to confirm this, is whether the 
GitHub issue tracker requires users to login with a GitHub/OpenID/OAuth 
account or not (or whether it's optional).  I think allowing anonymous 
bug reports is kind of important, although I'm not sure even SourceForge 
is allowing this now (I'm always logged in).

> Actually one possibility is to really keep the main git repository
> under SF and just mirror it to GitHub so people can create their
> personal branches. Git is a distributed VCS so it doesn't matter where
> the "master" repository is located.

IMO, as I've said before, if it's just read-only Git mirror, it adds 
very little value, and only solves a small part of the problem.  If a 
GitHub repository gets setup as a read-only repository (and by read-only 
I mean that none of the core devs actually use it or the features of 
GitHub), you're gonna end up with a tons of forks and pull requests 
against the main repository and none of the forks are ever gonna get 
merged back into the mainline rendering the whole workflow pointless, it 
will be the same as it currently is.  There will be no code reviews, no 
ownership of the changes, no record of pending change requests, and so 
on.  Instead of uniting the Geany community, I can only see this as 
fragmenting it and still the same problems with contributing.

>
> In fact, there are three different questions:
>
> 1. Do we want to switch to git?
> 2. Where should we have our git repository hosted?
> 3. Where should we have our bug tracker hosted?
>
> I suggest answering and implementing them one by one.

I suggest merging the first two questions into one.  The third of course 
needs more careful consideration since it's not as trivial to move the 
BT around, although as I said in another post, it probably wouldn't be 
super tough to move the BT reports from SF to GH since SF provides an 
export interface and GH an import interface.

My $0.02

Cheers,
Matthew Brush