On Fri, 19 Mar 2010, Yang Tse wrote:

> I believe there is an important factor about having the source repository in
> CVS or GIT. It is related with occasional contributors, those that use the
> tool or library find a bug and submit a patch. With CVS is is extremely easy
> for the occasional contributor to provide a patch. With GIT it is nearly
> impossible that occasional contributors will ever contribute anything back.

"nearly impossible" really?

But are most "occasional contributors" even using the version control system?
I think a large amount of those guys are using diff and the source off a
release tarball.

And besides, just getting the code and doing a diff is exactly as easy to do
with git as with CVS. One checkout operation, edit and then diff.

> Look for example at the libssh2 project, probably any other GIT repository
> based project will do, and count the number of patches provided on the
> mailing list since the conversion to GIT.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but the libssh2 project never got any large
amount of contributions so I must admit I didn't notice any change with the
conversion to git. libcurl may be a bit "hard core" to many people, but
libssh2 is one step further even more so.

> I strongly believe that GIT makes occasional contributors disappear.
> Time will tell if this also happens with libcurl.

Yes, time will tell - although we don't really have any metric so its hard to
do any unbiased comparisons. I think it is also a matter for us to help these
more casual contributiors to do these simple operations as they truly are
simple even with git. git is and can be complicated, but it really isn't for
those very simple use-cases.

-- 
  / daniel.haxx.se
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