[Sam Halliday] Re: github mirror

[Jani Nikula]

On Sun, 27 Apr 2014, Sam Halliday <sam.halliday at gmail.com> wrote:
> Sorry, I replied to jani and not the list...

...and I in turn replied to the private message. Oops. Let's try again.

On Sun, 27 Apr 2014, Sam Halliday <sam.halliday at gmail.com> wrote:
> In my experience the github pull review process is by far superior to
> any other solution.

I read and write code in Emacs. I read and write email in Emacs. I read
and write basically anything I can in Emacs. I have near total control
of that environment, mainly limited by my abilities.

Any review process that forces me to review code (in other words, read
code and write text) in an environment that I don't have control over
will be inferior to me.

The same is true for people using some other editor or mail client; they
can choose and control that environment, but they have no control over
github.

> If I were contributing to you, it requires having to learn your
> process, create diffs and then attach them, and then after a review it
> means tracking down the bits of the code you're referring to and
> manually reconciling that with my repo and sending you more
> diffs. Using github, it's like all open source developers agree on a
> basic set of common processes.

Funny you should say that; it used to be that emailed patches and
mailing list based review were the common process! I am not sure which
one is more popular these days (or what would be the appropriate metric
for comparing).

To be honest, I am slightly concerned by the popularity of
github. Despite being a hosting site primarily for open source, it *is*
a proprietary platform. Source code hosting is plain git, but AFAIK all
the rest (review process, issue tracking, and so on) is pretty much at
the whim and mercy of the company running it. They make a change, you
adapt. If you don't want to adapt, it's not easy to switch over to
another service provider either if you've built your process around
github.

So even if the features of github amazed me (they don't), I would have
pretty strong reservations about relying on them.

Disclaimer, I don't make the calls for this project, I only speak for
myself.

BR,
Jani.