[ESS] public git mirror?

[Rodney Sparapani]

Vitalie Spinu wrote:
> 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
>   
You might be right.  Or not.  Unfortunately, those 3 footnotes
don't add much to your argument.  The network graph for ESS
is as boring as the discussion in [3]; see it at
https://github.com/emacsmirror/ess/network and be amazed
(if you can't stand the wait; the spinning beach ball
will usually make me click away immediately).

I have seen variants of article [2] before.  However, notice
that Stuart Marks is actually a proponent of Mercurial (hg)
rather than git.  I briefly used hg for XEmacs development. 
And, I can honestly say; I don't get it.  If we were going down
this road; we need a nice tutorial.  The documentation of ESS is
verbose and temperamental; so I'm not using that as the gold
standard (and this is from someone who has spent countless hours
trying to improve it; imagine what others think :o)
I see that Stuart helpfully points to
http://www.bsdcan.org/2006/papers/DistributedVCS-paper.pdf
But again, that's mostly about hg and bazaar (of SXEmacs infamy).

So, I'm not saying you are wrong exactly.  But, you are wrong
if you are assuming that we will just jump on board; we need
a gentle introduction.  In SVN, we have avoided branches
since it was too technical; so this is the audience you are
dealing with.  Not Linus and Stuart.  Statisticians often
have good technical programming skills; but of the numerical
methods variety rather than Good Software Practices (or
whatever it is supposed to be called; I honestly don't
even know which is very telling).

-- 
Rodney Sparapani, PhD  Center for Patient Care and Outcomes Research
Sr. Biostatistician               http://www.mcw.edu/pcor
4 wheels good, 2 wheels better!   Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW)
WWLD?:  What Would Lombardi Do?   Milwaukee, WI, USA