On Feb 12, 2013, at 09:23:41, Jon Chambers wrote:
> I'm not asserting that other systems don't have helpful features, but I think
> Github's pull requests are a really nice tool. They make it easy for outside
> developers to submit patches and do a really nice job of facilitating
> conversations about code changes.
Moreover, a lot of developers use these tools.
GitHub's great strength is the network effect. It's how, at least in the
Mac/iOS community, GitHub with Git won out over Bitbucket with Mercurial (note
that Bitbucket now supports Git). Lots of people use GitHub, more than use
Bitbucket or GCH.
As one data point, here's my ISO 8601 date formatter on Bitbucket:
https://bitbucket.org/boredzo/iso-8601-parser-unparser
and on GitHub:
https://github.com/boredzo/iso-8601-date-formatter
The BB repo has 25 followers and six forks. The GitHub repo has 71 followers
and 20 forks.
The BB repo has also received all of three pull requests. The GitHub repo has
that many open right now, plus a fourth one that I've accepted and closed—and
this is a much younger repo.
> I recognize that changing version control systems and service providers and
> workflows are all Really Big Deals in their own right, and doing all of those
> at once is an Even Bigger Deal, but I (as an outside developer) do think it's
> a thing worth considering.
I've changed two of my Mercurial repoes over to Git (Time Machine Growler and
the aforementioned ISO 8601 date formatter), and it's not *nearly* the ordeal
that svn→hg was. You could write a shell script for this, wrap it in Platypus,
and have a droplet. The hg-git extension for Mercurial makes the job painless.
The harder part would be Trac integration, I think—I don't know what the state
of Trac's Git support is. (Plus the “getting the source” page would need to be
updated again, and probably some other things would need doing that I'm
forgetting.)
On a semi-related note:
Back when we did that changeover from Subversion to Mercurial, there weren't
any good Git GUIs. GitX might have existed, and it was better than nothing, but
other than that, the choice was between git(1) and hg(1). I still would prefer
hg today given that choice.
But we're not limited to the CLIs anymore. We have several great options for
GUIs, and the Git folks themselves even have a great list of them:
http://git-scm.com/downloads/guis
I personally use SourceTree, which is free and supports both Git and Mercurial.
You could all start using it today on Adium's existing repo, and continue using
it if we do move to Git.
