Le 01/07/2011 15:44, Itamar Turner-Trauring a écrit :
On Fri, 2011-07-01 at 15:23 +0200, Laurens Van Houtven wrote:
Well, part of the hypothesis of the effects of moving to Github is that a) the clear separation between "core contributor" and "random contributor" because a bit more subtle, b) it becomes easier for external contributors to contribute. So yeah, I guess it is, but it'd be cool if it became a bit more open to contributions from the more general public :)
I'm not sure getting more patches should be our main goal, for now. (It's a good *long term* goal!).
At least personally, moving away from SVN and Trac is not to directly get more patches. It's mainly that I want as a contributor to use better tools. Also, I don't want us to maintain the infrastructure; for example, moving to a more recent Trac cost me personally a good amount of time; we also have that problem with spam.
We have a large number of uncommitted third-party patches in tickets. We have a large number of half-finished developer branches (I'm working on a couple, since it's an easy way to get things done). These were not left uncommitted or unfinished because of tool problems, but because of other issues. Dealing with this seems to me to be higher priority than getting even more patches we won't get around to incorporating.
If you want more contributions, improving the processes so abandonment is less likely to happen is the first step. I can certainly think of ways in which e.g. github might help with that, but this is not a *technical* problem, it's an organizational and social problem, and at the very least you should think about how to solve it before redoing all the technical infrastructure. For example, making sure all reviewable tickets get reviewed within 7 days, and all new tickets get an answer within 3 days.
If a switch github is super-successful in getting us more patches, and then those patches sit in limbo forever, all we've done is alienate potential developers.
Well, that logic is a bit flawed though: you're kind of saying that we shouldn't use a better tool because it may bring us more contributors than we can handle. At the end of the day, we would still use a better tool though. -- Thomas