> On 03/29/2012 12:00 AM, Samuli Seppänen wrote: >> That said, the code itself is hosted externally on SF.net, so we have >> the _option_ of using GitHub for that part. I'd first look at the big >> picture of how we want to enhance our development processes and then >> move on to the tools. > Although I'm not an OpenVPN developer I've got a real world experience > with moving a project to github. For years I've had my little s3cmd > project (http://s3tools.org/s3cmd) hosted in SVN on SF.net and really > struggled to attract contributors. Once I moved to GIT and github.com > people pretty much immediately begun forking the code, developing > improvements and sending back merge requests: > https://github.com/s3tools/s3cmd/network > Obviously I don't merge everything they send me but the contributor base > truly exploded and very many improvements now come from these random > developers. > > I still keep a copy of the repository in SF.net's GIT but almost never > receive any emailed patches or any feedback at all on that front. All my > contributors use github. > > Just my 2 cents :) > Hmm, interesting. I have a couple of projects at GitHub myself, but they're for a very limited audience, so I haven't experienced any contributor explosions myself :).
I think the GitHub approach might help get a lot more contributions from "random" developers. At the moment, they'd have to go through quite a hassle to contribute: 1) Figure out where to send the patches (told in the Wiki) 2) Figure out how to subscribe to openvpn-devel 3) Figure out how git-send-email works 4) Send mail to openvpn-devel 5) Make modifications, if required 6) Unsubscribe / filter openvpn-devel mails, unless they want their inbox to clutter with stuff GitHub would help with 1-4 and 6. Perhaps we should experiment with using GitHub as an _alternative_ to mailing list patches and see what happens? The official development trees could still be hosted at SF.net. -- Samuli Seppänen Community Manager OpenVPN Technologies, Inc irc freenode net: mattock
