Re: Gitlab Migration

[João Távora]

On Tue, Aug 31, 2021 at 5:15 PM Clément Pit-Claudel
<cpitclaudel@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 8/31/21 12:03 PM, João Távora wrote:
> > gain, just anecdotal evidence which you may take for what it's worth,
> > but in fact I believe that the "slow", unfamiliar, peculiar,
> > old-school whatever-you-want-to-call-them methods used in Emacs
> > development may in fact be "aces up our sleeve", not just a means to
> > appease those that have been using them for a number of years.
>
> I had a different experience: a large project I contribute to occasionally 
> (Coq) moved to Github a few years ago, and that was followed with a 
> significant increase in first-time contributions.
>
> On a smaller scale, we have had many more (good) bug reports and pull 
> requests for Proof General since we moved it to Github.
>
> What this doesn't say is whether any "modern" workflow would have helped, or 
> whether it was specifically Github, because of network effects (the barrier 
> for contribution is lower if you already have an account and you are already 
> familiar with the UI).
>
> In fact, it doesn't even say whether it was the move itself that helped, or 
> whether the move was an irrelevant manifestation of a more welcoming approach 
> and a general effort to attract contributions.

Yes, something very similar happened when I and a colleague moved
SLIME to GitHub
around 2014, when it was almost moribund. It revitalized the project
in a way, i.e.
it increased the number of bug reports that were effectively reported,
but it didn't really
bring momentous changes or advances to the software  (I ended up doing
those in a
fork of it, which is now SLY).  It's certainly better there than in
the those moribund
Common Lisp venues and CVS.

I think you make good points, anyway.

João