Re: GitHub's “pull request” is proprietary lock-in

[Kevin Walzer]

On 1/2/16 11:43 PM, Ben Finney wrote:
> That and other vendor-locked workflow aspects of GitHub makes it a poor
> choice for communities that want to retain the option of control over
> their processes and data.

The Tcl community has moved to Fossil with great success:

http://www.fossil-scm.org

Lightweight DCVS, integrated bug tracking, rock-solid code (authored by 
D. Richard Hipp, uses SQLite as its store).

The transition was non-trivial: the Tcl core developers had to move over 
a decade of commit history from CVS at Sourceforge to Fossil, which they 
did, successfully. One of the reasons Fossil was chosen is exactly this: 
to maintain the code independent of a third-party platform. (At the time 
of the transition, in 2011, Sourceforge was removing support for CVS, 
they had a server outage for over a week, and other issues were giving 
the community pause on continuing to use SF for hosting.)

I'm not a hardcore Git user so have no substantive opinions on the 
merits of Git or Github per se: I have a Github account and have 
contributed code via pull requests to projects hosted on it. But I found 
learning Fossil very simple. And using Fossil does not preclude 
mirroring the codebase in Git; there is a Tcl/Tk mirror at Github.

Just a thought.

--Kevin

-- 
Kevin Walzer
Code by Kevin/Mobile Code by Kevin
http://www.codebykevin.com
http://www.wtmobilesoftware.com