[Numpy-discussion] curious about how people would feel about moving to github

[Stéfan van der Walt]

On 26 May 2010 23:27, Charles R Harris <charlesr.harris at gmail.com> wrote:
> Exactly. I had a private bet with myself that that would be the case. See,
> it isn't so much different after all. The tools change, but the problems and
> solutions remain much the same.

In this case, I believe the tool may be part of the solution. With
limited manpower at our disposal, having a somewhat painful process
certainly doesn't help.

- Working with patches is unreliable (check out all the patches in
Trac that don't apply cleanly and how much effort it will be to fix
them).  Distributed revision control provides a much better structure
within which to manage patches.

- Merging in SVN is horrible and will never encourage branches.
Without branches, trunk becomes turbulent easily.

- We currently don't have any code review in place.  This isn't SVN's
fault, but tools such as GitHub's compare view
(http://github.com/blog/612-introducing-github-compare-view) look
really promising

Maybe most importantly, distributed revision control places any
possible contributor on equal footing with those with commit access;
this is one important step in making contributors feel valued.

Regards
Stéfan