[postgis-devel] repository hosting (was: is PostGIS ready for git ?) NO?

[Daniel Baston]

If PostGIS were to accept contributions only through patches posted to
Trac, I think it would bring about two barriers to contributions:

- For every potential participant that does not want to sign up for a
GitHub account, there are > 0 participants (or potential participants)
that do not want to sign up for an account with OSGeo.  (The merits of
this are be beside the point.)  I say "participant" because account
registration is a potential barrier to bug reporters, not just
developers.  I don't think the project would be missing out on large
contributions from this group, but I think it would miss out on minor
contributions, like documentation fixes, that could be significant in
aggregate.

- The relatively minor inconvenience of generating, testing, and
posting a patch becomes more significant the smaller the contribution
is.  I can deal with the inconvenience of submitting a patch on Trac
for a feature implementation that's important to me, but I'd be less
likely to do it to suggest a minor code cleanup, fix a documentation
error, or fix a minor compiler warning that isn't actually causing me
problems.

No hard data, but my take from looking at GitHub PRs for this project
shows more contributors and smaller contributions than what's on Trac.

Dan

On 10/16/15, Sandro Santilli <strk at keybit.net> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 15, 2015 at 10:49:17PM -0400, Paragon Corporation wrote:
>
>> Is there a benefit to having a git - git mirror over an svn - git mirror?
>
> One benefit (minor) is with a full-git solution you could accept
> git-formatted patches withouth having to rewrite credits in the commit
> log, because the author is already encoded in the git-formatted patch.
>
> Another would be being able to use other projects under git as
> submodules (think the doc/ subdir, for example). I don't really see
> an urgent need for that right now.
>
>> If there is it's probably only a benefit to core developers like
>> strk, nicklas, dustymugs
>
> Actually, I don't see it as a huge benefit myself.
> Maybe packagers do, if I'm not wrong Greg Toxel mentioned it would
> be easier for them to track PostGIS from the debian git repo.
>
>> How inconvenienced are core developers with working with svn over git?
>
> No problem for me.
>
>> How inconvenienced are we with copying patches from github/gitlab ci
>> to our main repo or just telling folks, if you want your patch accepted
>> hand us a patch on trac.
>
> I've no problem asking to stick to the protocol.
>
>> If they aren't willing to do that much, then maybe they aren't worth
>> our hassle.
>
> Agreed. So far no contributor complained about that, as far as I know.
>
>> I'm not seeing the brave new world looking any better than what we
>> have now and it seems not a trivial effort to get there.
>
> Let's hear from packagers too.
>
> --strk;
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