On 18/03/2010 16:18, Robert James Clay wrote:
Ed, On Mar 17, 2010, at 7:32 AM, Ed W wrote:My vote would be to stick a github tree up. It's rapidly becoming the sourceforge.net equivalent.Considering that Sourceforge also supports git repositories, including being able to have mulitple ones per project, along with the rest of what they support; I'm don't see "equivalent" really being the right word...
I think your reply suggests that you haven't tried using github yet? Not saying it's the only toy out there, just that you might have overlooked how offering free hosting to people *contributing patches* to your project can be beneficial (not just free hosting for the core developers)
Basically the model are: SourceforgeI pull down your code, hack on it locally, get my own patches in my own local repo and crucially I can now easily roll those forward and pull in changes from upstream. BUT, to contribute some of my local patches I need to get off my arse and do something. If in the first iteration you don't like those changes then they sit on a mailing list or bug tracker and rot until perhaps I contribute another version
GithubI fork your code into my own public repo on GH. I pull that down locally, hack on it and then I'm incredibly encouraged by the free hosting to push all my changes back up to GH (hey, free backup I say to myself). To contribute some changes someone can either dig through my fork (often very straightforward using "git diff" or "git cherry"), or more likely I run up another branch where I tidy up some of my patches and send you a link to that branch. Now the key thing is if you don't like my first patch attempt then the code still sits there and "lives" and usually rots a lot less because you can "git rebase" at any time and proceed from there.
So, personally I think that SF only partially exposes the benefit of a DVCS and github more fully exposes it. The key difference is that with GH all potential contributors get free hosting to push some changes back again - with SF I need to get off my arse to push changes back. The theory is that the easier it is to push changes upstream then the more contributions you will get...
Regards Ed W