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1. It sounds like they do not want outside contributors. 2. They might not use one internally or using something old that does not expose to the internet well.
by brixon 11y ago
1. It sounds like they do not want outside contributors.
2. They might not use one internally or using something old that does not expose to the internet well.
- bakabaka9 11y agoI actually managed to contribute to it once, via the mailing list. This doesn't really invalidate (1), but maybe they just don't want GitHub-style forks ("modifying the supplied code 'in place' is something that we discourage").
- erikb 11y agoIt's unavoidable with open source. Take any project with daily tarballs and mailing list diffs and you can probably even code a solution that will transform it to a git repo. Actually a git repo is not that different from a tarball webshare with a shell client for diffs etc.
- nickpsecurity 11y agoYou mean in theory it will happen. I think the real question is, "Does it work in practice?" We'd have to look at software like these to see how many got forked versus similar software with repo's and such. My guess: I bet it does work for a good many of them because of developers being too lazy to go through the trouble. If the functionality is useful enough, then it won't work because the maintenance is easier than duplicating their work. Still, I'm not sure of the value in doing this kind of thing. The licensing schemes where you can't use the projects name in derivatives made sense: poor knockoffs can hurt image and adoption. Yet, people not wanting code to be used so easily probably shouldn't be open licensing it in the first place. These people are weird lol...
- erikb 11y agoOf course for small projects it won't happen. But for big ones it happens for sure. And then it doesn't matter if that (or these) repos are by the original author or not. If you can rely on regular updates to that repo then people will use it just as if it would be the original source and will spread just as far as any other repo based FOSS project. So I think for major projects the limitation you can achieve that way is minimal.
- nickpsecurity 11y agoI agree.
- jordigh 11y agoFrom #mercurial in Freenode where I found this, "I hope he has some [VCS] internally. He still releases archives with the odd random file or line of testing code in though."
- astrodust 11y agoIf you ever see someone release file.c.bak, it's just sad.
- ams6110 11y agoTo be fair, seeing .bak or .config or private key files, etc. accidentally pushed to github is not exactly uncommon.
- lstamour 11y ago.config sure, but .bak? That's what revision control software is for! :D
- ciupicri 11y agoPeople can still add them accidentally to the repository unless they have configured properly .gitignore/.hgignore/... By the way GitHub has a repository of .gitignore files for various tools and languages [1]. [1]: https://github.com/github/gitignore https://github.com/github/gitignore
- howeyc 11y agoThat was my thought as well (regarding 1). That they treat this almost like a code dump of their latest version, take it and use it, or don't.