Should We Relocate Our Repository?
Software Carpentry has been an open project since 2004: MIT License for the code, Creative Commons for everything else. All our stuff has lived in a public Subversion repository since then as well—it’s at http://svn.software-carpentry.org/swc if you want to check it out. Today’s question is, should we move that repo off our server and onto GitHub, BitBucket, or some other repo-hosting service? We want to make it easy for people to remix our content; as I said back in December, that means making it easy for them to fork, merge, and share. Would you be more likely to do this if our slides, learning plans, diagrams, and code samples were on some well-known hosting site rather than in Subversion on our own machine?
Categories: Content, Version 5.0
I vote for github. I haven’t used any of the other services.
If you are concerned about not scaring scientists away from version control systems, go for BitBucket with Mercurial. In sharp contrast to Git, Mercurial values simplicity over flexibility. It is written in Python and it carries its philosophy.
To prove the point, hardcore programmers will likely tell you to choose Git without a second thought. That is why it’s growing so much in popularity. However, I believe hardcore programmers are a good model for the antithesis of your target audience.
I think moving to a service hosting a DVCS repository would be a great idea and be in line with the project ideas/values. For me, something based on git would be fine though I do prefer mercurial. I think Joao has a point on mercurial being a bit more user-friendly and thus maybe more scientist-friendly
A problem services like bitbucket or github is that they are designed for source code, not so much for data/images/documents. It would be great if one of the hosting services supported image diffs as part of the webinterface, for example (actually, I did not check, maybe one does…?).
+1 for Joao’s response. I totally agree with him.
@Marcel Github supports image diffs: https://github.com/blog/817-behold-image-view-modes
Do you need to move? Would mirroring your subversion repo into each of the DVCS repo hosting services automatically be useful?
Perhaps it isn’t, and the idea should be discarded; even if it is, it would be useful to direct people with no preference to one of them. But it’s probably useful to consider it, however briefly.
I instinctively went for github, but maybe because I’m “hardcore”. The really important unknown is who will be forking/[whatever hg does] and reworking our material? If they are usually more advanced users (i.e. github users) then why not do that?
The buzz is around github (well, it’s a bit 3Q 2011, but whatever). I’ve specifically started recent projects of mine on github because it might be useful later for building a community. Even though I’ve never used git or github before.
With my scraperwiki.com hat on (where I work), we frequently get requests for github integration (note: not “git” or “a DVCS”, but “github”), by far and away the most frequent of those sorts of integrations.