This isn't entirely in response to your question - it's really just a rant on the topic that's been building up for a while, and I'm only speaking as a developer that enjoys using Smalltalk and Pharo in particular.
Personally - even as someone originally with a background in C and Java and so well used to file based SCM systems - I much prefer Monticello and working in the image in general. It worries me how much Git and GitHub is venerated by the recent generation of the Open Source community. Git itself is just a DVCS, it's not the first and it's not the last, it's arguably not the best or the worst either. It's just the most trendy right now. If we had a proper seamless connectivity to Git from within the image, I'd probably use it, as it would allow some external tools - particularly code review tools - to work a little better. But I don't think it'd be a revolution and I definitely wouldn't use GitHub. I'd host my own remote repository, or use something like BitBucket instead. I also don't think Git made any particular leaps in source management. Everything that Git can do, other tools can do one way or another. Some of the Git workflow is optimised towards working a particular way, but that doesn't mean you can't do those things in other systems. Additionally, some of the Git workflow is needlessly complicated (what's the point of staging for your local repository?) However, it's GitHub that really worries me. I'm disturbed by how often it seems that people assume Git means GitHub. GitHub is just one service for hosting projects, and it's a wholly commercial, proprietary one - and it's quickly becoming a bigger single point of failure for the Open Source world than Sourceforge was. It's just one option, and should never be considered to be the only one. In addition to that, it's still fundamentally focussed on file based projects - no matter how good Pharo based Git integration gets, GitHub will always involve some degree of impedance mismatch. There's a lot to be said for having tools designed specifically to work with your language and environment - that's why IDEs exist. So I think the Squeak community made the right decision when they originally created Squeaksource, and now the Pharo community is making the right decision by getting behind SmalltalkHub. GitHub has some very good features, but I think the community in general would be better served by having some of those features - and features in GitHub competitors - in SmalltalkHub than by trying to shoehorn Smalltalk projects onto GitHub. (Though some have already achieved that). In the end, I think the whole issue generates more talk than it's worth. If the owner of a project is happy with how they're handling their source at the moment, then there's no problem, even if someone not involved in the project wouldn't have made that choice themselves. If they're not - there are already alternatives. BTW, if you want to use GitHub for your own projects in Pharo, you can - just have a look at FileTree (https://github.com/dalehenrich/filetree). You have to use git itself external to the image - as FileTree is just responsible for creating a structure suitable for file-based source control, but it does work. Regards, Stuart On 20 March 2013 12:58, Victor Stan <[email protected]> wrote: > Why are SmallTalk projects/source code hosted on SS3 Gemstone instead of > Git/GitHub? > > I'm coming to SmallTalk from the world of web development with open source > software, primarily Rails, and I'm very familiar with the amazing social > network/source code repository that is GitHub. It is truly an industry > defining entity, so many open source projects have been able to harness the > ease of use, features and community around Git and GitHub. > > At the moment, as I'm trying to learn more about SmallTalk and Pharo > especially, (my primary interest in Pharo is to use it as a web development > platform), I am a bit shocked, if I may be frank, at the tooling used for > source code and open source project management. I see that the popular trend > now is to move to SS3/Gemstone, and I appreciate anyone that helps open > source development/projects, but I can't see how they can even come close to > the functionality of GitHub for source code hosting and OS project > management, so I pose the question: is there an effort, why or why not, to > start integrating with GitHub and Git for source code management? > > I know that historical precent and the tools built into Pharo/SmallTalk > images, like Monticello are predecessors to GUI source control, but given > the leaps that Git has managed to take, in distributed source code > management, how does the existing SmallTalk community feel about it's > current tooling in this regard? > > Thanks, > > Victor Stan > > Schedule me: > http://quicklyschedule.quicklyschedule.me/victor > > Add me to your address book - it's easy! > http://contactmonkey.com/victor >
