[ESS] public git mirror?

[Vitalie Spinu]

>>>> Martin Maechler <maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch>
>>>> on Mon, 23 Jan 2012 16:13:38 +0100 wrote:

  >>>>>> Rodney Sparapani <rsparapa at mcw.edu>
  >>>>>> on Mon, 23 Jan 2012 09:02:43 -0600 writes:

  >> Aleksandar Blagotić wrote:
  >>> IMO, it would gain more public attention if it was hosted
  >>> on GitHub. I'd certainly like to see ESS there, as both
  >>> developers and users could easily report/fix bugs, thus
  >>> making ESS even more cooler. GitHub is far form being
  >>> only a free git repo service. It has awesome
  >>> collaboration tools!
  >>> 
  >>> aL3xa
  >>> 

  >> git is designed for a very decentralized development
  >> philosophy.  We don't have enough ESS developers where it
  >> would be appealing to move to git IMHO.  

  MM> I entirely agree.
  MM> Also the drawback that you need funny stamps etc for all the
  MM> branches is really an extra complication which I would not like
  MM> compared to simple revision numbers.

It's actually a two-way path, we also don't have enough developers
because of the rigid development system. Git encourages and is all about
branching. On GitHub forking and pull requests are one click away.  Very
decent bug tracking system, network graphs [1], statistics and all their
pro-social-and-collaboration tools are making contribution painless and
as frictionless as it can possibly be.

GitHub is full of one-file.el projects with more people on it than ESS
has developers. Such a big project as ESS will end up with many more.

It's also not only about collaboration. Work-flow with SVN can be a real
pain. This blog [2] has quite some points to which I would add my grief
that svn really forces me to commit prematurely. I am working on 3
machines and always missing the code which I didn't commit from a
different machine. With git branching that wouldn't have been a problem.


I would really like to see ESS on GitHub. They have "organizations" [3]
for grouped-owned projects which is free for open source. Thus no
migration or maintenance trouble with setting up our own
server. Actually there is already ESS-git on Emacsmirror "organization"
https://github.com/emacsmirror/ess .

As an alternative, we can just try it out and fork ESS-SVN as an user
account. If successful in an year or two we can think of migrating ESS
to git completely.

Best, 
Vitalie.

[1] https://github.com/blog/39-say-hello-to-the-network-graph-visualizer
[2] http://blogs.oracle.com/smarks/entry/why_i_don_t_like
[3] https://github.com/blog/674-introducing-organizations