[OpenLayers-Dev] GitHub straw poll

[Tim Schaub]

Paul Spencer wrote:
> Tim,
> 
> I don't have a strong opinion on this, it seems like it may be
> somewhat disruptive to move to a new system and it is not clear to me
> that there is a huge gain from this.  What is your motivation for
> proposing this?  Is it because DCVS is technically superior or will
> eliminate some bottleneck in our current system?  In all the replies
> so far, I haven't seen you respond with your motivation.
> 

My motivation for taking a poll was to get a sense from the developer 
community (those active and interested in becoming more active) on 
opinions about using git - and in particular GitHub.

I didn't start with my opinions because it was intended to be a poll and 
not a pitch.  There are still a number of people who I think it would be 
good to hear from - but I also know that long threads wander and get boring.

Since you (and Schuyler) asked a direct question, here's a partial 
response: I think GitHub does a great job of lowering the bar to 
"participation" in a project.  For example, you can submit a patch 
(essentially) on GitHub without leaving your browser [1].  I imagine 
that could be particularly handy for documentation & example patches.

Regarding Schuyler's boat rocking, I doubt anyone would argue that given 
a long enough history, OpenLayers will move from subversion.  There is 
obviously a lot of room between boat rocking and clinging to helplessly 
deprecated software - and I grant that the poll implies an interest in a 
bit of boat rocking.  But as I mentioned, it was just a poll, and I 
wouldn't push for anything that there is real opposition to.

Tim

[1] Example directions from jQuery UI about submitting a patch: 
http://forum.jquery.com/topic/howto-submit-a-patch-to-jquery-ui-using-the-github-web-interface

Compare to http://trac.openlayers.org/wiki/HowToContribute

Note that I don't really think this alone would do great things for the 
project - we're not suffering from a lack of trivial patches.  I just 
think it is a cool feature.




> Cheers
> 
> Paul
> 
> 
> On 2010-04-16, at 7:22 PM, Tim Schaub wrote:
> 
>> Hey-
>> 
>> In advance of our infrastructure meeting (time TBD), I thought I'd
>> take a poll for the heck of it.
>> 
>> Would people be in favor of or opposed to moving the OpenLayers 
>> repository to GitHub?
>> 
>> If the developers are interested in a change like this (even if it
>> is not until 3.0) we could create a PSC managed account called
>> openlayers and put whatever projects (e.g. website, openlayers)
>> under that. Anybody could fork.  "Core" committers would become
>> collaborators on the openlayers account.
>> 
>> If we go with GitHub, we may or may not want to use their issue
>> tracker. This is a separate topic for discussion (the github-trac
>> plugin can allow some integration of Trac and GitHub).
>> 
>> If we go with GitHub, we could also discuss using their wiki and
>> GitHub pages for a static website (still hosted from
>> http://openlayers.org). These are also separate topics for
>> discussion.
>> 
>> I'm interested mainly to hear if people are generally in favor or 
>> opposed to the idea of a repository move - and a move specifically
>> to GitHub for hosting.
>> 
>> Tim
>> 
>> 
>> -- Tim Schaub OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org Expert service straight
>> from the developers. 
>> _______________________________________________ Dev mailing list 
>> Dev at openlayers.org http://openlayers.org/mailman/listinfo/dev
> 
> 
> __________________________________________
> 
> Paul Spencer Chief Technology Officer DM Solutions Group Inc 
> http://research.dmsolutions.ca/
> 


-- 
Tim Schaub
OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org
Expert service straight from the developers.