Re: [tlug] Open-source repository question

[Edward Middleton <emiddleton@example.com>]

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> - github (and similar for Mercurial) is a hyperactive development
>   community, oriented to distributed development.  Probably not
>   appropriate for a mature project.
>   

I don't really agree about it not being unsuitable for a mature project,
unless by mature you mean dead.  If you are hoping to pull together
changes from some of the variants or make it easier for others to do so
then git is probably the best tool and github is arguably the best to
host.  The bigger question is, do you want tools to make the merging and
tracking easier or just somewhere to dump your tars.  If you haven't
used git or another DVCS then there will be a learning curve which might
not be justified.

Mattia Dongili wrote:
>One last comment, I personally don't like github that much. I think
it's too easy to fork and lose
> track of other people's work. As far as I could see you have a
maintainer chasing people for patches
> instead of contributors trying to get their stuff included upstream.

Well presuming you are talking about forking in github, it is actually
pretty easy to follow what has been done by forkers[1].  To be honest, I
think that trying to stop forking by force is the wrong approach to take.

My general feeling about sourceforge et. al. is that they are places
where projects go to die.  The general process seems to be that the
principle developer loose interest or runs out of time and those
interested in helping quit give up or just pull the latest version and
leaves.

Edward

1. http://github.com/blog/39-say-hello-to-the-network-graph-visualizer