Thanks for the detailed response. On Saturday, March 29, 2014 7:28:22 PM UTC-7, Thomas Broyer wrote: > > > Do you imply that the same system that is used for Android and ChromiumOS > lacks credibility? The same that's also used by Eclipse, OpenStack, Typo3, > Qt, Wikimedia, etc. https://code.google.com/p/gerrit/wiki/ShowCases >
I think simple things like having a View On GitHub button, the Fork This Project on GitHub ribbon and the silhouette of the GitHub mascot on the GWT project site would all provide *more* credibility and charm to lure people to the project. I think other UI frameworks/platforms like AngularJS are gaining more traction/adoption because they are accessible through GitHub. > I agree GitHub is more familiar to many than Gerrit, and that would > probably ease contributions. > But, as far as I'm concerned, I wouldn't move to GitHub (at least for GWT > proper). > > The main reasons we chose Gerrit were: > * side-by-side diffs > * enforcing a clean history (this is particularly important as Google > syncs their internal Perforce repo with the public Git repo, the history > needs to be linear for them) > The website doesn't have those "clean history" constraints, but it'd be a > bit strange to use another system to review changes for the website than > changes to GWT proper (note that I'm not strongly against it) > I believe you can find some discussions on the subject in the archives of > https://groups.google.com/d/forum/gwt-steering > > At GitHub, to maintain a clean history means that you either ask every > contributor to rebase and squash their branches before you can merge them, > and/or you rebase and squash them yourself when merging, but it at least > means being very careful when clicking the "merge" button (so careful that > you'd probably want to disable it –that's not possible– and force every > commiter to merge manually with --ff-only or --squash). > > We're starting seeing integrations between Gerrit and GitHub ( > http://gerrithub.io/), so who knows, maybe one day that plugin will be > available on gwt-reviews so contributors will be able to submit changes as > GitHub Pull Requests rather than pushing them to Gerrit. > i think side-by-side diffs can always be attainted through a 3rd party tool. if the contribution is small i don't see the big advantage. if the contribution is very big you're likely going to pull the branch yourself to examine/run it. At my current workplace, we ensure our main project repo has a "clean" history as well by having developers: 1. fork the main repo 2. commit/squash/push to their personal repo 3. send pull requests from their personal repo to the main repo In the mean time, I believe what we need is better documentation. Our > "making GWT better" web page is really light. Patches welcome. > The webpage improvements should be a different discussion but I think it needs a much bigger overhaul in order to "productize" it more. Ideally it would be competitive with other sites like AngularJS (http://angularjs.org), Scala (http://scala-lang.org), Google Cloud Platform & GAE (https://cloud.google.com), EmberJS (http://emberjs.com), IntercoolerJS (http://intercoolerjs.org), etc. There are tons of projects built on GWT which is fantastic but there is hardly any talk about it and almost nothing on Hacker News which is kind of sad. I think it would also help us if we got GWT on the radar of services like Prerender (https://prerender.io), SEOjs (http://getseojs.com), Brombone (http://www.brombone.com), etc which would help drive home the fact that it's a serious product that is viable for enterprise and public facing sites. > >> Not to mention, it is simply much more social and transparent. >> > > !? > I could understand the "more social" argument (although I don't think it's > a compelling one), but "more transparent"? > The two are very intertwined in my eyes. Having recognizable people/users from other popular projects on github starring, commenting and contributing to GWT along with an easier to use interface yields a higher amount of perceived transparency. It sounds like Gerrit has a feature that only allows patches from people >> that have signed contributor legal agreements. >> I guess I don't really understand why this is necessary now that GWT has >> become fully open sourced and is no longer owned by Google. >> > > Required reading: > http://julien.ponge.org/blog/in-defense-of-contributor-license-agreements/and > http://www.clahub.com/pages/why_cla > Ideally, the GWT Project would be a legal organization so you'd sign a CLA > with the GWT Project. But it's not, so you still sign an agreement with > Google. > > Yes, there are things like CLAHub; but you need to train all committers to > not look at patches until the CLA has been signed, it's not enforced. > Similarly, GitHub hooks with the PR status API can inform you of the build > status of a pull request, but nothing prevents you from merging it. On the > other hand, merging a change that fails to build in Gerrit needs special > permissions (even though we don't do a full build, so in practice a change > can still break the build without failing the pre-check) > That was insightful reading. thank you. why does an implicit agreement to abide by the terms of a CLA upon pull request not suffice? isn't the source code license implicitly agreed to when its downloaded/used within another project? the bits about "poisoned commits" seem plausible but the CLA doesn't physically prevent this from happening. I guess it just allows easier finger pointing in the rare event that such a scenario arises. > >> AngularJS is on GitHub..doesn't make sense to me why Google Web Toolkit >> can't be. >> > > Well, it is (https://github.com/gwtproject) but only as a mirror (to make > forks easier), and not for all projects (it's probably just a matter of > asking GitHub to mirror the missing projects). The issue tracker is still > at code.google.com and contributions go through Gerrit. > > Note: CloudFoundry tried Gerrit but moved to GitHub: > http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2013/02/26/forking-permissive-licenses/#comment-813480084I'd > be interested in knowing the reasons for the change. > -- http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Web-Toolkit-Contributors --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "GWT Contributors" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
