curious: why use own hosting rather than github?

[Matthieu Weber]

On Mon, 25 May 2020 at 01:33PM +0200, J Rt wrote:
> > Are the patches lost because a mailing list is a bad communication
> > channel, or are they lost because the maintainer does not care enough
> > about the project to actually collect the patches, review them and
> > integrate them? In the second case, the maintainer could equally ignore
> > pull requests made through github/gitlab/whatever.
> 
> I do not know, but I feel sympathy for the maintainer there, in the
> meaning that it must be really quite hard to keep an overview of the
> issues vs patches vs noisy discussions like this one ^^ .

Of course, but the mailing-list -based workflow has been decided by the
maintainer, so I assume he knew what he was doing when taking this
decision.

> Maybe I am just very ignorant of some tools that can be coupled to
> mailing lists and that can make life easier, but I can see how the
> mailing-list based collaborative development workflow can become
> quickly unmanageable.

It's true. It very much depends on how well organized the maintainer is,
and how reactive he is when a patch is submitted.

> At least having everything gathered, cross-referenced, tagged, with
> permalinks to the code, etc, in an issue tracker, may help a bit...

I haven't participated in the development of password-store in a long
while, but my understanding of the workflow is that since it's
essentially completely distributed (the mailing list is centralized, but
it provides no more than a broadcast channel to reach all developers),
it would be every motivated contributor's responsibility to keep track
of the patches (i.e., to do the things that a centralized system like
github does) and of the discussion, by archiving locally all the messages
from the mailing-list. This is a lot of work, and having a centralized,
automated tool such as github would make it easier, but the whole point
of a distributed workflow is to be decentralized, so a centralized
tool would defeat the point.

This way of working is of course not obvious to the people who join the
mailing-list (I only became aware of it by reading the discussion in the
past few days here) as there is no developer guide that tells you “keep
all the emails you receive from the mailing list, because there is no
searchable, centralized archive”.

> But may be wrong of course.

Not necessarily. I'm not aware of decentralized tools that would provide
the same features as github (ticgit/be/git-bug would provide
decentralized ticketing systems with comments, I'm not sure how to
handle pull-requests). Also, a fully distributed workflow would require
each contributor to publish its patches in a publicly accessible git
repository, so that anyone can pull those patches. Publishing them on
the mailing-list works too, but it requires more manual work.

But the main problem for this projects I guess is that there is only one
maintainer (who is a central node in the network of contributors) who is
not very reactive. If patches were reviewed and merged or rejected
quickly, we would not be having this discussion.

Matthieu
-- 
 (~._.~)            Matthieu Weber - mweber at free.fr              (~._.~)
  ( ? )                http://weber.fi.eu.org/                    ( ? ) 
 ()- -()          public key id : 0x85CB340EFCD5E0B3             ()- -()
 (_)-(_) "Humor ist, wenn man trotzdem lacht (Otto J. Bierbaum)" (_)-(_)
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