On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 1:14 PM, Itamar Turner-Trauring <itamar@itamarst.org> wrote:

Unless I'm mistaken, Github is a proprietary system, which means I'm
unhappy about hosting our project there. At the minimum I'd want a very
good story about how we can get all our data out if we need to. And even
then I'd probably be against it. What's more, we can switch to
git/bzr/hg without switching to a hosted system (e.g. trac with
GitPlugin, and redmine has builtin integration for all of those.). Why
does git imply github?

True, GitHub is proprietary, but it's free for open source projects. There are many high-quality open-source projects hosted on it:

* Erlang/OTP (https://github.com/erlang/otp)

* Redis (https://github.com/antirez/redis)

* Jquery (https://github.com/jquery)

* RabbitMQ (https://github.com/rabbitmq)

* Ruby on Rails (https://github.com/rails)

* Node.js (https://github.com/joyent/node)

* Tornado (https://github.com/facebook/tornado)

to name a few. GitHub also has an extensive API to programmatically access/backup all information around your project (like tickets and wikis), and it has integrated code review which allows you to comment on individual lines of code (this could be better, but generally works well).

I suppose the main reason to even suggest it, given its proprietary nature and use of git, is that's currently where a lot of developer activity is, and its growing. GitHub makes it easy to contribute patches to projects and keep track of progress. It also has a nice way to keep track of related repositories (via 'organizations').

And, well, it looks better than Launchpad and is bit more mature than Bitbucket.

Given the past involvement in Launchpad and its use of Twisted though, I understand why that would be an obvious choice. I just want to make sure all sides of the argument are represented.

In my opinion the biggest barrier to new developers is not whether we
use git or subversion or what have you, but the high quality of code
required (coding standard, tests, passing code review). A DVCS may well
encourage more users, but I'm skeptical it will have a major impact.

I think you're right in that code quality is the most important factor here. However, as a small point, a DVCS surely should be able give the project a better ability to maintain high quality code though - isn't Combinator just tool over subversion to make branching easier? At least with most DVCS's branching is cheap, so there wouldn't need to be yet another tool to setup to get the development process started for new developers.

Reza