Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad behdad org>]

Dave Neary wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
>> What I told
>> you was that because the switch does not affect those other people.  Yes, if
>> your contributors are NOT committing to GNOME SVN, their opinions doesn't
>> matter.  Neither does my mom's opinion matter in this case.  Nothing wrong
>> with that.
> 
> This is only true if you don't believe that future contributions to the
> GNOME base are independent of the RCS we decide to host on gnome.org
> (should we decide to host only one).

You are of course right.  I probably should also have added that "list of SVN
users" is the only affordable way we could do a closed survey.  Simply because
that's the only list we have.  The only other realistic alternative would have
been a public survey with no authentication at all, and I hope we agree that
that would have not been more representative than the survey we did.


> If you can identify people contributing to GNOME projects outside
> gnome.org who would commit directly to gnome.org if their preferred RCS
> were available, then there is an opportunity cost to saying that their
> opinion doesn't matter - if you don't consider their opinion, they will
> never be committing directly to gnome.org (maybe that's OK, maybe it's not).
> 
> The question which we could ask in this case is: how many people are
> contributing regularly to GNOME projects, and don't have an account on
> GNOME SVN? And why don't they?

How do we do that objectively?  I can name 10 people that push code to fdo
instead of GNOME because of their VCS preference.  The next guy can name 10
that push to Launchpad for the same reason.  The promise of the survey was to
give us solid numbers.  How do we do it for anything other than current
account holders?


> Another question: what is the cost associated with hosting multiple
> DVCSes? I understand of course that most people don't even have one SCM
> tool installed on their system. But for those not using a DVCS, moving
> from 0 to 1 is the big move, and I am not sure that there is a huge cost
> to having both git and bzr hosting on gnome.org, for official GNOME
> projects (especially if those who want to use a git client for
> bzr-hosted projects may do so).
> 
> 
> <snip>
> 
>> Yeah, whatever.  I can't care less about what you prefer because you are
>> already using it and are happy about it.  Keep your personal feelings out of
>> this thread then and everyone will be the happier.  If others need their
>> opinions expressed, I think they should do that themselves.
> 
> Behdad - it's disappointing to see you doing the same thing which you
> expressed disappointment at this morning. This contributed nothing &
> wasn't a very nice reply. Can you follow your own advice & stick to the
> topic (which is, as you said, giving input to the people who will be
> doing the work - and to my mind, saying that there are GNOME projects
> not hosted on gnome.org because of the revision control system is
> relevant to that discussion).

Guilty as charged.  I took it personal too.  My bad.

Cheers,
behdad


> Cheers,
> Dave.
>