[kde-community] Have repo maintainers opt-in for github mirroring (was: Re: Official KDE mirror on github)

[Teo Mrnjavac]

On Saturday, September 19, 2015 13:04:55 David Edmundson wrote:
> > > I was under the impression they were disabled by the options we had
> > > selected. Unfortunately that is not the case.
> > 
> > Thanks for clarifying on this.
> > 
> > I hope they can still be disabled.
> > 
> > They can't. I had spent some time looking before. Sorry.
> 
> However, we have solid hard data that it's a non-issue.
> 
> Gnome has been mirrored on github for nearly 2 years, in that time GTK has
> had a grand total of 4 pull requests over time.
> Most others (gedit, cheese, epiphany) have had 0.
> 
> Interestingly they have had literally hundreds of github "forks", which
> implies it has led to sustantiable numbers of patches back using the
> traditional methods
> 
> I've made a wiki page, which says how to turn a pull request into a
> reviewboard submission.
> https://techbase.kde.org/Development/GithubMirror
> 
> If we get any questions we can then just copy and paste that, and don't
> need to spend any time explaining. Bam, done.
> 

Thank you David, for your get-things-done approach in this controversial and 
tense situation. It is really much easier to solve than it seems from all 
these threads.

I'm personally in favor of letting projects decide whether to allow GitHub 
pull requests or not, but regardless of the final decision it is good to 
already have practical solutions like this techbase entry.

I find it unfortunate that some long time KDE contributors feel that KDE goals 
are threatened by all this. I understand their concerns, but I assign those 
concerns a different priority score. In fact, the inflexible policy towards 
3rd party (including proprietary) infrastructure and processes we have in KDE 
deters me from bringing some of my own (currently GitHub-hosted) work under 
the KDE umbrella, as this would hinder some very productive working 
relationships with our downstreams and potentially result in *less* free open 
source software being produced, deployed and used.

It is also a fact that KDE is an aging community, and in its future I expect a 
slow decline unless we find a way to bring in a steady influx of new 
contributors. Recruiting a new generation of hackers is something that's just 
not happening fast enough at this point (our yearly GSoC stats are an 
indication of that). GitHub could be a very powerful instrument in turning 
this trend around by tapping into a huge talent pool and pushing people 
towards our own infrastructure while still allowing them to get started 
through an environment they already know.

Cheers,
-- 
Teo Mrnjavac
http://teom.org | teo at kde.org