Re: Mirroring GNOME on github

[Nicolas Silva <nical silva gmail com>]

On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 2:08 PM, Jasper St. Pierre
<jstpierre mecheye net> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 10:10 AM, Nicolas Silva <nical silva gmail com> wrote:
>>
>> I think the biggest benefit of using github is not the interface
>> itself, but rather the potential number of new contributors.
>> Since the D programming language moved to github, it has received
>> vastly more contributions from the community than ever before.
>> I definitely understand the proprietary concern though.
>> I like the idea of using github as a mirror rather than using it for
>> the primary repository.
>
> Correct. But I'm unsure how a mirror is going to attract contributors.

Well, github is part of a lot of people's workflow. It is nice to use,
it makes it easy to fork  project, and then have your own fork where
you do your own stuff, your work being versionned on github even
though you actually don't have commit access to the actual project's
repository.
Being able to do pull requests is certainly a plus for potential
contributors, but it would be quite hard to integrate to the normal
review/integration process. I think making it easy (like in
github-easy) for people to fork the code and hack on it while it is
being versionned by github (and not just a local clone) is already
something that could help getting contributors.
At mozilla a lot of people use the github mirror of mozilla-central
(instead of the official hg repository) even though they extract patch
files and submit them on bugzilla rather than doing pull requests.

Cheers,

Nicolas Silva