A CLA is required for any contribution, even patches. An SVN
repository doesn't inherently fix this as patches can still be sent to
committers over email and then checked in. While it's true git
encourages more distributed workflows it's still the responsibility of
committers to make sure all contributions are contributed under a CLA
whether they come through svn, git or osmosis.
I'm skeptical that an apache lab repository would really be "under the
oversight" of anybody since few would be watching it outside of those
contributing to it which I assume are the same people currently
working in github.
Github does have he advantage of allowing *other* people to use this
code easily and modify it for their own uses before it's made it in to
the main line repository, even if those contributions don't make it
back upstream because of CLA issues they are still providing some
level of testing and stability checking over the work.
-Mikeal
On Aug 6, 2009, at August 6, 20095:24 AM, Curt Arnold wrote:
While I'm bringing up contentious issues, use of github for a
sandbox for developing significant modifications to CouchDB makes me
uneasy. If I start something on github and accept contributions and
ideas from other uses, I can't represent the eventual patch as my
original work (as required by the CLA). Also, it reduces the
visibility (barring an explicit opt-in) of the development from the
radar of the PMC and community. Other ASF projects have created
"sandboxes" in their SVN for experimental work and the threshold for
commit access to the sandbox could be lower than the trunk (still
would require CLA and an Apache account). Any Apache committer
could use Apache Labs, but since that is not developed with the
oversight of the community that still needs a pass through the
Incubator. Having a sandbox or labs branch in the CouchDB SVN would
provide a location for non-trunk development that is still under the
oversight of the PMC and community.
