On 2013-01-13, Troy Howard wrote: > One thing to consider is that the ASF workflow is a bit stodgy to work > with. It really does make a difference to collaboration, as any small > barrier makes it too easy to opt out of contributing and collaborating.
OK, I bite ;-) What you describe (and I have largely snipped now) is how github pull requests lower the barrier to entry and how "send a patch and attach it to a JIRA ticket" is more cumbersome. Over at log4net we have people struggle with creating patches. What otherwise seem to be competent developers fail to use diff or even use svn diff. Using git would be even more difficult for them. This may not be the target of "get more people involved in development", I'd aggree with that. I can't contest that pull requests are really easy for people who have done that a few times. But there is a bit more to it. In my limited experience with pull requests it seems they create more "drive-by contributions" than the more heavy weight process at the ASF. The fact that forking and creating pull requests is so easy seems to result in pull requests by people that never show up again after it has been merged. It feels as if people who have jumped through the hoops to actually contribute are more prone to stick around. I may be wrong. Another aspect is that many times forks are created to fully implement a feature in isolation that somebody feels is worthy. If you start out by proposing the feature and discussing it with the existing community first you may realize the majority doesn't want the feature or that a completely different way to skin that cat is more appropriate. I don't say you couldn't have those discussions up front in a "pull request world", it just doesn't seem to happen as often. Again, I may be wrong. The github "pull request world" seems centered around the code itself much more than the traditional way of the ASF which believes to be more centered around the community of developers. I'm not saying the "pull request world" is inferior (nor it is superior) but rather that at least I'm not sure how well the "pull request" view mixes with the ASF philosophical goals. Then again, we are free to use git and I'd be all for trying out how well it works for us. After all a pull request at github really just is some icing on top of what you can do with the git CLI anyway. Nothing would stop you from manually merging a fork into your local git repo and push the change to the ASF repo - you just didn't have the button inside a Web-UI. But this difference is only visible to the existing committer base, not to the developers who want to contribute. Stefan
