I am no github expert and for a long time I resisted getting to know it but grudgingly I do appreciate its value, especially for projects that benefit from multiple contributors.
The most important elements in my mind are: 1. The ability for potential contributors to push PR's that the maintainer(s) can then review and decide whether to include in the current branch. This makes it almost trivial to review and incorporate patches. 2. Ability to have multiple branches (especially a 'testing' branch for cutting edge code that has not yet been sufficiently tested to qualify as a release) 3. Ability to see clear history of changes making it easy to see where things have been added or potentially broken. 4. Ability for individual contributors to create their own local "forks" to test and maintain their personal changes and where appropriate push them back as PRs to the main branch. It takes a few hours maybe to learn but the benefits for a multiple-contributor, community project are huge and worthwhile IMHO. G.W. Haywood wrote at about 17:33:12 +0100 on Saturday, June 14, 2025: > Hi there, > > On Fri, 13 Jun 2025, Paul Fox wrote: > > > Where were you planning on forking your source base, in that case? > > CPAN. > > > Is there another source base I don't know about? (Quite possible, > > but github seems to be where releases since 3.3.0 have come from.) > > I think the version on Github is what you'd call the canonical one, > at least for the present. > > > I wouldn't hold out much hope of finding him: > > Someone sent me a telephone number privately. The sender didn't know > for sure if it was correct but it appears that it is. An answering > service responded, I left a message asking Dr. Barratt to take a look > at the mailing list. > > > ... So you simply don't know how to use github. > > Not so much that I don't know how to use it (although I'm not really > familiar with it) as that even the bits that do work are like pulling > teeth and most of the time for me it doesn't work at all. For example > I tried to respond to the post of "Two weeks ago" in issue #518 from > Mr. Moisseev. In the post he said: > > "I don’t see much benefit until we have someone actually willing to > take on the maintainer role. Once there’s a clear candidate, asking > him about expanding the team would make sense." > > I wanted to reply with links to a couple of my posts to this mailing > list (dated 17 September 2024 and 11 June 2025) in which I indicated > my willingness to take on maintainership of BackupPC. > > This was the result when I tried to reply using Github: > > [quote] > Open > Status of the project > #518 > Description > @haarp > haarp > opened on Mar 10, 2024 > > Hello, > > is BackupPC still maintained @craigbarratt ? > > I'm asking because this repo has not seen a commit, issue or issue comment > by the author in two years now. The issue count keeps rising, and there are > a couple of open PRs with no progress towards merging. > > There are some issues like #437 which can lead to surprises and problems, > but would be easy to fix. Other issues like #252 show potential > interoperability issues with some tools which used to work differently, > showing BackupPC's aging progress. > > BackupPC is a great tool that sees a lot of use by people and organizations, > with more popping up all the time. It would be a shame if it started getting > buried under the sands of time. > > Cheers! > Timeline cannot be loaded > > The timeline is currently unavailable due to a system error. Try reloading > the page. Contact support if the problem persists. > [/quote] > > The quoted post isn't even the one that I was trying to reply to. > > I really don't have time to spend trying to get around the excessively > complex interactions between somebody's broken Web pages and somebody > else's broken browsers. > > OTOH I've been using my mail client for decades with no problems. The > tool just doesn't get in the way. > > -- > > 73, > Ged. > _______________________________________________ > BackupPC-users mailing list > BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net > List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users > Wiki: https://github.com/backuppc/backuppc/wiki > Project: https://backuppc.github.io/backuppc/ _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki: https://github.com/backuppc/backuppc/wiki Project: https://backuppc.github.io/backuppc/
