[mapserver-dev] move to github ?

[thomas bonfort]

Jeff,
Not answering to your points here, rahter to some concerns Frank
raised on IRC yesterday concerning contributions to the docs. My
opinion is that the barrier of entry for doc contributions will
actually be significantly lowered compared to our svn solution. This
is especially  true for one-shot contributions, regular contributors
would have to adapt to the git syntax like all the other devs, but
this isn't particularly hard.

Here's the workflow for a one shot doc contribution, from someone
who's not a doc committer:

- go to github, click on the "fork" button in the mapserver-docs
repository to get your own doc tree
- from the github interface, navigate to the file you want to fix in
your forked branch
- use the online editor to fix the typo you found, or add the
paragraph that was missing
- click on the "pull request" button, add your message: "Hi Jeff,
there was a typo in  the ogc docs, here's the fix"

You now receive a notification about the change, merging it into the
different doc branches is a click of a button. The user didn't have to
install git or svn, download the mapserver-docs repository, open a
trac ticket, attach a patch. Isn't that cool?

I also believe that our current strategy of branching the docs at each
release could be simplified, reducing the work needed to commit doc
changes to multiple branches as we do now.

regards,
Thomas

On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 14:47, Jeff McKenna
<jmckenna at gatewaygeomatics.com> wrote:
> My thoughts:
>
> - I don't yet understand the full benefits of github, but that doesn't
> mean I'm not open to it
> - from the outside it seems that we should make this switch sooner than
> later
> - but we shouldn't commit to this until we have at least a few weeks of
> funding for a Sys Admin at professional rates, so we can do this
> properly (I saw the pain that Howard went through for the CVS-SVN
> switch).  Actually I would give it a full month of funding, to help
> along the changeover.  So have a pot of $5,000 USD dedicated just to
> this changeover (I'm being open and putting rates here, but it's not
> me/my work so Sys Admins please speak up with accurate cost/effort
> estimates)
>
> Thanks for listening.
>
> -jeff
>
>
>
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