On Feb 12, 2013, at 9:58 AM, Peter Hosey <bore...@adium.im> wrote:
> 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.
>
>
Which reminds me, updating Adium's ISO 8601 formatter to the latest would be a
useful project. NSCalendarDate is terrible.
David
