Re: [tlug] Open-source repository question

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Edward Middleton writes:
 > 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.

By "mature" I mean "the features that any sane person could want are
already there, and nobody is staying up nights twittering about it."
If you're a kernel developer, "dead" is probably what you'd call it.

 > 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

Been there, done that, and no, git is not clearly the best tool for
that.  Git is the best tool for managing a highly dynamic project IMO,
but among the distributed tools (specifically git, hg, bzr, and darcs)
Darcs has arguably the best UI for merging existing treess because it
has a builtin diff editor.  (Of course you could use Emacs diff-mode,
but Darcs is probably the user-friendliest.)

If you expect some of the forks to see independent development, then
any of git, hg, or bzr will do, and git has a deservedly bad
reputation for UI.

 > 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.

Yes, that's precisely my point here, except that I wouldn't charactize
Jim's goal as "dump your tarballs".

 > My general feeling about sourceforge et. al. is that they are places
 > where projects go to die.

By comparison to github, that's not surprising IMO.  (1) SourceForge
has the longest history, but never deletes a project AFAIK.  Of course
it accumulates dead ones.  (2) github is going to attract developers
whose projects are still at the frenetic stage of development.  Of
course it's going to look lively.