Re: "Forking is a Feature" reactions?

On Sun, 12 Sep 2010, Jeff Hammerbacher wrote:
> I'd love to hear the reactions of other ASF members to the piece. I'd 
> also love to be directed to previous discussions on the topic, as I know 
> that adopting git for some projects has been discussed previously.

At the moment, many ASF projects publish a read-only git repo at
<http://git.apache.org/>, for those who wish to work locally with git. 
However, offial commit is restricted to svn

The issue here isn't technical, it's social. How do people know where to 
send patches? How do we do IP clearance on git pushed or pulled patches? 
What happens when a committer pulls a patch from someone with an icla, but 
that person's patch includes patches from others who don't have one? How 
do potential users avoid the confusion that github used to present of 
never being able to tell which of the 50 forks is the one they want? How 
do we keep discussions coming back to the mailing list, where everyone can 
see and participate, rather than having them splinter off into hidden 
groups?

(And probably a few other questions that were raised during the last 
couple of barcamp and mailing list discussions on the topic, which I have 
now forgotten...)

It's now been a year or so since the git mirrors went up. At the time, we 
didn't have answers to these problems, which is why they were read only. 
However, the world has moved on since then. Perhaps git tooling has 
improved to solve some of these? Perhaps now more people use git, some 
things have been solved by a general societal change of git users? I'm 
certainly looking forward to a productive Git debate at the apache retreat 
this weekend, and again at the barcamp at ApacheCon in November :) If you 
can suggest good answers to any of these problems (or the ones I've 
forgotten...), then I'm sure everyone will be keen to hear!

Nick