Re: Mirroring GNOME on github

["Jasper St. Pierre" <jstpierre mecheye net>]

On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 1:30 PM, John Stowers
<john stowers lists gmail com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Disadvantages
>>> * Maintainers might see this is mandating them change their workflow.
>>> I emphasize that github should be only a mirror, interaction and
>>> merging should occur first on git.gnome.org
>>
>> This is a killer. There would just be forks of random GitHub
>> repositories with patches, and people submitting pull requests, that
>> are as effective as /dev/null. Slashdot writes that we're mirroring on
>> GNOME, and the designers are the cabal again.
>>
>> if we want to mirror on GitHub, we need to have an active presence
>> there. I don't know what that would mean.
>
> I don't see how your second paragraph follows from your first (and the
> cabal bit is just confusing).

I'm just saying that we need maintainers to manually look at GitHub
every once in a while for pull requests, and file a bug upstream or
merge into the repo or something. Maintainers are already overworked,
so I doubt they're going to do that.

The other alternative is telling everyone that files a pull request
"this is not the appropriate mechanism for contributing back
upstream", even politely, is a turn-off. Are they going to make the
effort to register at Bugzilla and learn how to use git-bz? I don't
think so.

> I believe that the most important consideration is whether github will
> attract more contributors to the project, and if so, whether the
> benefit of such will be worth working with a non-free UI.
>
> Would it be fair to say you acknowledge that it will attract more
> contributors ("random[1] forks and patches") but on balance think it
> will not be worth the non-free UI?

But will the contributors forks and patches be respected? If we don't
make an effort to upstream contributions from GitHub (which is manual
effort), their time is wasted, and all we've done is put up a trap for
potential contributors to fall into, where what they should have done
was to file a bug and patch upstream.

It also means that we're maintaining two separate infrastructures --
one on git.gnome.org, and one on GitHub. Fragmentation is never good.

> I'd quite like to have pull requests that I can ignore (or format into
> a patch to merge)...
>
> John
>
> [1] s/random/GNOME/ (that is the point remember. we currently have
> random forks there)



-- 
  Jasper