[OSGeo-Discuss] OSGeo guidelines for code hosting ?

[Andrea Aime]

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:

[image: Inline image 1]


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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Ing. Andrea Aime
@geowolf
Technical Lead

GeoSolutions S.A.S.
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