[TYPO3-doc] Encouraging people to contribute with Github

[Stefan Neufeind]

On 02/23/2013 06:30 AM, Michael Schams wrote:

[...]

> The benefits are tempting and other open source projects switched to
> GitHub, too - but keep in mind, this would be a step of the TYPO3
> project to depend on a company and their directions/decisions. I know,
> that this topic has been discussed in other areas, e.g. the typo3-dev
> and typo3-ect mailing lists as far as I can remember.
> 
> Do not get me wrong: I am not totally against the GitHub idea but I
> hesitate to be excited about it and I am looking forward reading your
> comments and opinions about my concerns - maybe I am totally wrong :-)

I also have a problem with relying on GitHub or any shiny tools not
really open and/or not on TYPO3-infrastructure. That's also why I'd
appreciate to see some externally developed, useful tools from the
community be integrated on TYPO3-infrastructure.

Imho GitHub could be one "frontend" for people to use to create their
patches and submit them back to the TYPO3-systems - just as if they'd be
using a git-client locally to push a change. But apart from that I don't
see any code-reviews, editing or bugtracking being done with
GitHub-services.


I remember back to the time before git and before our current
code-review-system in place. And I feel that introducing gerrit,
interacting with forge etc. has brought us a huge step forward. Also in
terms of openness (basically everybody can contribute to reviews).


When people often mention that it needs to become easier to contribute
and that GitHub has shiny web-based tools for that (especially for the
docs-team) I agree. But things like webbased editors (and be it Wikis or
things like Etherpads) are not rocket-science. And if we see such needs
I'm sure we can integrate webbased editors for easy editing and pushing
to gerrit - either integrated with gerrit (maybe contributing some code
to them) or through some API to gerrit.


To sum it up: I'd like to propose not just to see GitHub or similar have
"so much cool stuff" but to take a step back and make a list of things
we'd actually need to work better (webbased patch-editor, ...). Then we
can see how we can implement that - without loosing good things from the
current infrastructure and workflows of the TYPO3-community.


Kind regards,
 Stefan