Bringing herbstluftwm to Github?

[Florian Bruhin]

Hi,

some probably controversal proposal from me: What about creating an
"official" herbstluftwm project on github? Pushing code could be
managed via git hooks, so Thorsten could still push to the FAU repo
which then gets auto pushed to github.

Rationale:

Some search engines like duckduckgo display github repos on top in
some box. There are now some unoffical repos[1] floating around and
all this might be confusing for people - actually I remember people
linking some github repo and asking if that's the right one.

The issue tracker and pull requests could be disabled, but I'd even
vouch for enabling them. Why?

- Issue trackers is how people expect to be able to report issues
  nowadays. I remember people asking where to report stuff.

- If someone wants to contribute, they can easily look at the issue
  list instead of digging through the mailinglist and checking what's
  not done yet by hand.

- Many people already have an account on Github, so it's very painless
  for them to create issues and contribute.

- Many issues are forgotten after some time, or not in BUGS at all, or
  in BUGS but fixed, or in my personal collected wishlist but not in
  BUGS, so not easily visible for anyone.

- It's much easier to add comments and more information to long-living
  issues this way, and have everything at one place.

- My personal opinion aside (I actually see why you prefer patches per
  email for single commits now) - pull requests are how people
  instictively try to contribute to projects. Just lately I've seen
  someone say "why can't we contribute to Python? There's no Github
  repo!" in #python.

I believe the aim should be to make contributing as easy and native
for people as possible, even if that means some more work for the
maintainer. After all the time "gained" by a contribution is much
bigger than the one lost by using a different git workflow.

We can still say patches to the ML are the prefered way of
contributing, but I believe it'd attract more people to report their
issues, and probably also more people to contribute. And if someone
doesn't want to learn about git-format-patch/git-send-email, etc., I
think this shouldn't be the thing holding them back from contributing.

What do you think?

Florian

[1] https://github.com/search?q=herbstluftwm

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