Re: Announcing GNOME's official GitHub mirror

[Luis Menina <liberforce freeside fr>]

Le 15/08/2013 12:44, Emmanuele Bassi a écrit :
> > Actually, the fact that we have to ask to opt out is an issue in
> > itself. We shouldn't even have to. This should have been opt in from
> > the start. People (maintainers and commiters in this case) shouldn't
> > have to fight to get back what you have taken away from them.
>
> considering that this is a mirroring system of a distributed version
> control system, I'm puzzled as to what has been lost. you still have
> all your rights to the software you maintain and commit to, and you
> still have the right to push your work to more than one repository.
> care to elaborate a bit more on this?

I'm not a maintainer, but it seems to me that a maintainer may want as
few entry points for patches as possible, or at least not need to poll
to find patches. We already have bugzilla, or git.gnome.org. If extra
clones exist and seem officially endorsed by GNOME, and there's no
process to send those patches upstream, this clearly means it's up to
the maintainer to poll for patches on these extra clones.

If the maintainer agrees to look to those extra clones, all is well, but
if he decides he won't look at them (because it's too much work, or for
whatever other reason), he may want to disable them. That's because when
people put GNOME code on Github themselves, they don't expect the
maintainer to be aware of that. If *we* clone it there, then there may
be expectations, giving the illusion the maintainer cares about what is
done there.

IMHO, if we want all of GNOME source cloned, and don't want to allow
each maintainer to opt-out of extra clones, we should at the very least
have a disclaimer telling that the maintainer encourages upstream
contribution and should not be expected to poll or care about that extra
clone.

Another way would be to give information about the coding standards
where are the extra clones, and allow pull requests. But this would put
extra pressure on the maintainer.

My 2 cents...
--
Luis Menina