Re: Out-of-date mirror on GitHub

[Frank Terbeck <ft@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ramkumar Ramachandra wrote:
> I think it's nice for every project to have an up-to-date mirror on
> GitHub, so contributors can maintain a fork and regularly send patches
> upstream (via email in this case). [...]

I always thought that the nice thing about decentralised systems like
git was that they allowed contributors to keep forks even without a
central place like github. Github is only useful if you want visibility
for your changes and even then you can just publish a repo with your own
account. On github, bitbucket or $yourserviceproviderhere, it doesn't
matter. I actually think having more than one canonical source (and one
that might be out of date as we can see) would actually hurt.

Personally, I do have a mirror of the code repository on my account. But
I don't want to see push requests or forks or any of that. I won't
promise, that it's up-to-date. I won't even promise, that it's there
tomorrow... I only use it to, from time to time, show someone something
I've worked on.

Since any real changes have to go through the mailing lists to pick up
X-Seq: header numbers¹ for later reference anyway, I think everyone is
better off working on a clone (which already _is_ a fork) of the
canonical zsh code repository at sourceforge, and using git's excellent
mail-workflow related tools (like "git format-patch", "git send-email"
and "git am").

Regards, Frank

¹ If you wonder what those are, you might want to take a look at the
  README of https://github.com/ft/zsh-am, which explains zsh's
  traditional development style and a way to cope with it with the
  minimal amount of pain from an integrator's point of view.