Changes to our Git infrastructure

[Jeff Mitchell]

On 4 Jan 2015, at 10:15, Cornelius Schumacher wrote:

> On Saturday 03 January 2015 15:31:26 Ben Cooksley wrote:
>> (...excellent summary of discussion...)
>>
>> Commentary on the above would be appreciated.
>
> There are two questions which aren't addressed int he summary, but 
> which I
> think are important to have good answers for before we can take a 
> decision.
>
> The first question is: Who do we want to address? We obviously want to 
> address
> existing contributors and for that the list represents the needs quite 
> well.
> But to what degree do we want to address new contributors? Collecting
> requirements on kde-core-devel won't give us the input we need, if we 
> want to
> address people who are not already part of our community.
>
> The second question is: What are our requirements for hosting? Do we 
> want to
> host it ourselves, or would we be ok with a third party hosting the
> infrastructure as well, and under which conditions?
>
> Both questions are related to GitHub, which has been mentioned in the
> discussion quite a bit. It would address a lot of our requirements and 
> it is
> something especially new contributors are familiar with.
>
> I'm not saying we should simply move to GitHub, but as it is brought 
> up so
> often, we maybe should review our position, and make sure that we know 
> why we
> are not going with the flow, and why we are paying the price of a 
> higher
> barrier of entry and the additional effort of hosting our own 
> infrastructure.

GitHub has been mentioned as a comparison point, but I can't credibly 
believe that we're willing to migrate to GitHub en masse, no matter what 
the flow of the industry is. I'm not stating my personal preferences on 
the matter, but the direction and feedback to the sysadmins has always 
been FOSS-only. If GitHub *is* on the table, then we need to consider 
other non-FOSS possibilities as well.

I do agree that we want the barrier to entry to be as low as possible. 
As is often the case, I think that may conflict somewhat with what some 
of the more/very experienced developers might find to be most useful to 
them personally. Finding the best balance is a difficult task.

--Jeff