Victor Stan wrote:
> Why are SmallTalk projects/source code hosted on SS3 Gemstone instead of
> Git/GitHub?

Because we have been using DVCS since a few years before git. 
Monticello is not as powerful as git, but it is integrated and the difference
is not large enough to force change yet.

> 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.

Our perspective is a bit different. We use Moose and see the work of
Veronica Uquillas Gomez on Torch (http://soft.vub.ac.be/torch/Home.html)
and ask ourselves why people continue using bad abstractions.

> 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?

Because it isn't that good. It is better than what we now have widely
deployed, but it doesn't come close to what we can do when we find the time
to integrate all the nice research tools. 

GitHub is centralized and a single point of failure. We will see it replaced by
a distributed system. 

So it is a question of how much effort we want to put into what for us
can only be an intermediate tool chain and way to connect to 
non-smalltalk parts of the systems we develop.

Stephan Eggermont

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