Current status of the GNOME Github mirror

[Andrea Veri <av gnome org>]

Hey,

more than half a year has passed since the GNOME Github mirror was
setup and we are incredibly happy that it has contributed positively
to bring more contributors to the GNOME Project. While new
contributors joined the GNOME community and started contributing
through the usual workflow of submitting patches to Bugzilla many more
made use of Pull Requests (PRs) which we explicitly requested not to
use on the description of the mirror itself [1].

It's clear PRs might be seen as a handy and straightforward way to
contribute code or documentation to a specific GNOME module especially
for contributors that aren't familiar with GNOME's procedures of
submitting patches. On this matter I contacted the Github team asking
whether it was possible to remove PRs on our specific organization.
Unfortunately at this moment of time there's no simple way for that to
happen.

Apparently we don't have a simple solution we could apply to solve the
problem all together but the ideal way to start limiting the waste of
contributions and patches on Github would be shipping a
CONTRIBUTING.md file on each of the hosted repositories. Creating such
file will automatically create a warning when the user will try to
open a PR against one of the modules. An example of what the
CONTRIBUTING.md file should contain:

"""The GNOME contributing guidelines do require patches to be
forwarded to GNOME's Bugzilla instance hosted at
https://bugzilla.gnome.org, as such please do not open Pull Requests
(PRs) against any of the modules under the GNOME organization as they
will be ignored. More information is available at the following wiki
page:

  https://wiki.gnome.org/Sysadmin/GitHub""";

That said, I would like to invite anyone interested to include the
sample file above on the module/s they contribute to. If you have a
different opinion on how this should be managed, please follow up to
this thread.

Have an awesome day!

[1] https://wiki.gnome.org/Sysadmin/GitHub

-- 
Cheers,

Andrea

Debian Developer,
Fedora / EPEL packager,
GNOME Infrastructure Team Coordinator,
GNOME Foundation Board of Directors Secretary,
GNOME Foundation Membership & Elections Committee Chairman

Homepage: http://www.gnome.org/~av