[OSGeo-Discuss] OSGeo guidelines for code hosting ?

Sun Oct 18 02:53:46 PDT 2015

A lot of what instigated this conversation is what PostGIS should do? stick with SVN/Trac, get rid of SVN and just move everything to GitHub, or have an OSGeo GIT and a GitHub mirror and still keep trac.

I don't think it makes sense for us to completely ditch github, but then I also think there is a downside to having github as our official repo.

Right now PostGIS is mirroring our svn repo to GitHub and we get enough pull requests from users, sometimes even big patches.  So I think having a mirror on GitHub takes care of that. It's a bit extra effort to accept the pulls, but that may be a good thing as it forces us to scrutinize more.  So we get the benefit of travis testing etc already.

However I also care about package maintainers since to me they are the life and blood of PostGIS.  They insure that new users have an easy time installing postgresql / postgis.

Many of them would prefer OSGEO hosting (and preferably git over svn)  because why force someone to get a github account just to put in a bug report or submit a patch.  If they should be forced to create an account with a  faceless organization, it should be OSGeo :), not github.

Relevant notes from Package maintainers:

https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/postgis-devel/2015-October/025361.html

https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/postgis-devel/2015-October/025359.html

We also have a lot of users who just report bugs.  I'm not so sure they have github accounts or care to. Bug reports are more important to me than new contributions as every new contribution requires some level of stress testing.

Thanks,

Regina Obe

PostGIS PSC member

Windows PostGIS Stackbuilder Maintainer

From: Discuss [mailto:discuss-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Andreas Hocevar
Sent: Sunday, October 18, 2015 3:08 AM
To: OSGeo Discussions <discuss at lists.osgeo.org>
Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] OSGeo guidelines for code hosting ?

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.aime at geo-solutions.it <mailto:andrea.aime at 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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