Re: Development - an outsider’s perspective

[Russ Allbery]

Carsten Wenderdel <chrisforen@outlook.de> writes:

> 3. Repository: Ease of use

> People with less than 15 years of development experience have probably
> never used CVS. Everything is git today. The most visibility gnubg would
> have on GitHub.Some developers care about their contribution statistics
> on GitHub; commits on Savannah are basically hidden. GitHub also
> provides CI (Linux, Windows, Mac) free of cost for public repositories.

> So my suggestion is to first move the repository to GitHub. I’m willing
> to help with the move and could also create GitHub actions for CI that
> automatically build gnubg with every pull request. What are your
> thoughts?

For what it's worth, we recently moved development of INN from Subversion
to Git and put it on GitHub.  I did that mostly because I was tired of
running Subversion infrastructure and it was my last remaining Subversion
project, and I wasn't expecting any real difference in contributions to a
very old piece of software with a fairly niche audience.

I was surprisingly wrong.  We immediately started seeing more
contributions, higher-quality bug reports, and a more active community,
having done nothing other than change version control software and using
GitHub.  (I'm not sure how much of this was Git and how much was the
hosting platform, since we did both at the same time.)

No idea if this will generalize, but it made me rethink the utility of
such moves, which I had previously thought were at best housekeeping and
probably wouldn't matter much.

(I know GitHub, specifically, is controversial in some circles, and I
don't mean to start that whole argument here.  It's just what we happened
to use for various reasons.  I think the key things it offers is the issue
interface and the pull-request development model, which are also available
from other systems, most obviously GitLab.)

All that said, I suspect the most critical bit of development for gnubg at
the moment is completing the GTK+ update to the latest version of the
libraries, and that's likely unrelated to the hosting platform and just
requires someone with the right knowledge sit down and do a bunch of hard
porting work.

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>