[ESS] public git mirror?

[Ken Williams]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ess-help-bounces at r-project.org [mailto:ess-help-bounces at r-
> project.org] On Behalf Of Vitalie Spinu
> Sent: Wednesday, February 08, 2012 12:31 PM
> To: Martin Maechler
> Cc: ess-help at r-project.org; Rodney Sparapani
> Subject: Re: [ESS] public git mirror?
>
> 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.

Just to add my perspective: whenever I want to get involved with an open-source project these days, I basically (slightly subconsciously) *expect* it to be hosted on Git, preferably on GitHub.  If it's not, the barriers to entry are a lot higher, so I might just not bother getting involved at all.  It does make a big difference.

I've noticed the same thing on the flip side, when people want to contribute to a project of mine (typically some Perl module, pretty similar in size to ESS), the first question they ask is whether I'd support moving to Git.  I always say yes, the process takes about 5 minutes, most of which is just filling out a form on GitHub describing the project.

I appreciate the learning curve that the core folks would have to overcome, but there are some pretty big benefits to making the leap.

>[...]
> 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.

It might not take that long to make a pretty convincing case.  The Git train is moving *really* fast these days.

 -Ken

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