[TYPO3-dev] Contribution to community extensions

[Philipp Gampe]

Hi Dominique,

Dominique Feyer wrote:

> I'm used to Gerrit, but the workflow is to complexe. Many big opensource
> projet work with github and so many developper are used to the PR
> workflow. I don't want a Gerrit vs Github discussion. The discussion must
> be focus on how friendly, as a community, we are to external contribution.
> Gerrit UI is terrible and the workflow too complexe.

Many big open source projects work with Gerrit (apache, eclipse, android, 
etc).
The Gerrit UI *is* terrible.
The workflow is rather simple. Create clean patches to submit, push them, 
get a change ID, add it and push again (or use the commit hook to push 
directly).

> That's a key point for an opensource community. We are alive because we
> have contributors. So we need to take a lots of care to ease the
> contribution wall that we have currenty. I speak about Gerrit but also the
> CLA.
> 
> About the CLA why enforcing a CLA for submitting a patch ? When we can per
> exemple require a CLA is that patch can be merged after review. That's
> less frustration for the new contributor.

CLA is a legal requirement and as such not up for discussion. The only thing 
we can discuss is the workflow required to acknowledge the CLA. I like the 
drupal way to just hit a checkmark in your user settings for this.

Without a legal comment, you cannot even use attached patches in the issue 
tracker, because you miss the legal clearance and the contribution to your 
project might not have been authorized. Making users sign a CLA makes the 
users at least think once about what to contribute and shifts the legal 
stuff away from you.

> Yes Gerrit is opensource and Github is not ... but is that a real point ?

Does not matter due to the nature of git.

> Contributing to documentation is a important example, where the online
> edition on github rock a lots. Even for small bugfixe it work nicely. The
> new issue on github solve a lots of problem.

The point was not github, but a direct editing facility. Creating a github 
account would be a problem, but github is popular enough to make most users 
already have an account. Anonymous submitting is not possible either.

There is one big flaw with the github fork and pull-request approach: There 
is not intrinsic authoritative labeling, making it sometimes hard to find 
out, which fork is the authoritative fork.
This creates a big hurdle in order to in order to fix security issues. If 
people use the forks, they are vulnerable to security issues that might have 
been fixed in the authoritative copy long time ago.

Best regards
-- 
Philipp Gampe – PGP-Key 0AD96065 – TYPO3 UG Bonn/Köln
Documentation – Active contributor TYPO3 CMS
TYPO3 .... inspiring people to share!