Re: "Forking is a Feature" reactions?

On Wed, 15 Sep 2010, Santiago Gala wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 8:04 AM, Dirk-Willem van Gulik
> <dirkx-HuV/[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> > Especially as the pattern seems to be conductive to personal
> > gratification** more than community; and leads to patchcollections
> > which are the work of love of a single person quite easily. And that
> > seems to cause fragmentation on an end to end level. I.e. rather than
> > scratching your own itch - and solving it at a product level - you
> > create a small alternate reality in which you nullify the issue, in
> > which you isolate - and then welcome people on your island - but
> > you've not made the world a slightly easier place. Somehow it feels as
> > if there is some driver lacking, some positive need to have
> > communities collaborate.
>
> What makes you think that without github people effectively tries to
> get patches "upstream"? IMO, most of may patches have remained forever
> in my HD until I deleted or a crash destroyed them.

Right. In my experience a lot of places that deploy open source software
will fix little niggles (gaps in functionality / integration impedance
mismatches / whatever) in an expedient manner. They are often reluctant
to expose their changes because they are too specific or scruffy.

> Github puts a *public* **indexable** fork one click away. It gives you
> a backup, so that there is incentive to have all your microchanges up
> asap.

Right, and it seems to be encouraging people to make their previously
private patches public. I agree with you that dirkx is observing a problem
that was always there but previously less visible.

> IMO, the main differente between distributed and centralized SCM is that
> centralized SCM people views my work as "dirty" working copy, while
> distributed SCM people views it as commits pending integration in my
> repository...

I have been quite impressed by the culture of code review on the git
mailing list, and the way they use the tools to improve patchsets before
integration.

Tony.
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