[Chicago] DVCS Workflows?

[Cosmin Stejerean]

On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 2:01 PM, Martin Maney <maney at two14.net> wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 01:39:00PM -0600, Cosmin Stejerean wrote:
> > Github's social features only work when other forks are also on Github.
> The
>
> Yeah, it's another silo.
>

That's true, and I'd like to add that one should never forget that. As much
as I like github for the convenience it provides, git is a *decentralized*
VCS, and I think it's hilarious when github goes down and people start
complaining that they can't access their repos. The good thing is git makes
it incredibly easy to push changes to, and track, multiple remotes, so I see
github more as a centralized place to make it easy for people to discover my
work, and an off-site backup for my projects, rather than some integral part
of my workflow.


> > really enables a truly distributed way to hack on an open source project
> > because I don't have to wait for the main project to accept patches, and
> I
> > also don't need to resort to the manual process of tracking down
> interesting
> > patches on websites and mailing lists and having to main them locally
> > myself.
>
> As long as it's all on github.  Still, that is kinda nice... but you
> still need to visit (or, at least, subscribe) to some separate service
> for the bug tracker or mailing list or etc.  I'm seeing a lot of stuff
> in the code.google silo that's just using the bug tracker, with a
> pointer on the home page to github (and vice versa, of course).
> Personally, I'd take a more integrated tracker + repo over github's
> "social" features... as long as I didn't have to make the repo
> Subversion.  A few years back I thought Subversion was the best thing
> since sliced bread, but it suffers from feet of CVS.  :-(
>

I've never liked the bug tracker in Google Code so I'm glad github didn't
try (and fail) to build a decent one. But I think the de-facto choice for
bug tracking for Github projects is Lighthouse (Github integrates nicely
with them for post-commit). Recently I started using Pivotal Tracker (
http://www.pivotaltracker.com) and so far I like it more than anything else
I've tried.

Also, like you said earlier, github is a silo, and I one for one feel better
not keeping my bug tracker there.


>
> > Also, the ability to watch a project you're interested in and having
> their
> > commits show up in your news feed is pretty neat, and a good way to
> follow
> > what's new in a project you find interesting.
>
> What news feed?  Something I have to poll github for?  I'd really
> rather have a commit mailing list or some such, thanks.
>

The "News for you" is an RSS feed you can subscribe to, which is an
aggregation of commit notifications from all the projects you are tracking.
Github does however support post commit hooks and it comes with easy
integration to things like email, twitter, jabber, irc and several hosted
bug trackers. So if you want to have a mailing list for commit messages it's
trivial to set-up.

-- 
Cosmin Stejerean
http://www.offbytwo.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/chicago/attachments/20081119/fb8b5239/attachment-0001.htm>