[Given that it is a general libwin32 question I've copied Chris Madsen and the libwin32 mailing list for a wider chance for feedback. Chris is the only other maintainer besides you and me who actually committed changes to the libwin32.googlecode.com repository, so his opinion is important too.]On Sat, 16 Jan 2010, Cosimo Streppone wrote:
Hi Cosimo, > after some initial (strong) resistance to git, recently I migrated > some of my personal repositories to github, and I found it to be > practical and easy to manage. Indeed, I personally prefer git over svn quite a bit too. The one reason I have for sticking with Google is that I feel they are more likely to still be around in 5 years than GitHub. GitHub seems rather popular right now, but we have to remember that they are still a very small startup company. It will all depend on them having sufficient paying business to keep the free repositories around. (I know plenty of people who have similar sentiments about SourceForge and keep frequent repository snapshots externally in case SF should unexpectedly shut down.) > Would you mind if I added a libwin32 repository on github? It would be > just a copy of the official one, that I would use as my "external > backup repository". > > Initially I considered moving just the Win32-API part, that is the one > I need, of course, but that seems to not work. Maybe I'm doing > something wrong with git-svn. > > Or, do you plan to move libwin32 to git(hub)? Yes, I've been thinking about this for a while already, but have problems making up my mind how it should work. I don't really like the idea of setting up the "canonical" repository as a single repository under my personal account. I would prefer to use a "libwin32" account and then have each Win32::* distribution be in its own repo. The problem is that the GitHub "Terms of Service" do not allow me to open a second free account. I guess I can always email them and ask; I'm sure they are interested in migrating repositories over from googlecode.com. :) The question is though: if we split up the libwin32 repo into individual module repositories, is there really a reason to store them under a single account on github, or should each maintainer just keep their own repo, adding collaborators as needed/wanted. After all, anybody can fork any repo on github and then send a pull request back to the official maintainer. So is there still a point in the central account? In the end people use CPAN to locate and download the modules. And we can use the META.yml files to link back to each canonical github repo so people will be able to discover them easily too. The one reason for the "mega-repo" setup is that every maintainer will have a complete copy of the whole libwin32 setup. So we would still have some level of redundancy to reconstruct the data in case GitHub should suddenly vanish. Not sure this is a big concern though; in the worst case we'll always have the public releases on CPAN and BackPAN. So what do you think? Cheers, -Jan
