Re: Move selected documentation repos to PSF BitBucket account?

On Sat, Nov 22, 2014 at 10:49 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan@gmail.com> wrote:

> More generally, I'm very, very disappointed to see folks so willing to
> abandon fellow community members for the sake of following the crowd.
> Perhaps we should all just abandon Python and learn Ruby or JavaScript
> because they're better at getting press in Silicon Valley?


That's a really low blow, Nick.

I think these are the facts:

- Hg/Git are equivalent in functionality (at least to the extent that the
difference can't be used to force a decision), and ditto for
BitBucket/GitHub, with one crucial exception (see below)

- We're currently using Hg for most projects under the PSF umbrella
(however, there's https://github.com/python/pythondotorg)

- Moving from Hg to Git is a fair amount of one-time work (converting
repos) and is inconvenient to core devs who aren't already used to Git
(learning a new workflow)

- Most newer third-party projects are already on GitHub

- GitHub is way more popular than BitBucket and slated for long-term success

But here's the kicker for me: **A DVCS repo is a social network, so it
matters in a functional way what everyone else is using.**

So I give you that if you want a quick move into the modern world, while
keeping the older generation of core devs happy (not counting myself :-),
BitBucket has the lowest cost of entry. But I strongly believe that if we
want to do the right thing for the long term, we should switch to GitHub. I
promise you that once the pain of the switch is over you will feel much
better about it. I am also convinced that we'll get more contributions this
way.

Note: I am not (yet) proposing we switch CPython itself. Switching it would
be a lot of work, and it is specifically out of scope for this discussion.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)