State of Pidgin: Attracting and Maintaining New Contributors

[David Woodhouse]

On Tue, 2017-10-03 at 09:43 -0500, Gary Kramlich wrote:
> 
> I hear what you're saying, but honestly it's not much.  I went into
> detail about the drive by contributions and similar topics in the
> video, so I can only assume you missed it, didn't watch the video at
> all, or just out right disregarded it.

I haven't watched the video at all; I've tried to read the emails with
due diligence but even that's a stretch today... :)

>   Aside from that, I also
> mention (at least I have previously) that open source software is
> about providing choices, no one is providing a choice.  Everyone is
> using the same tool for the same job creates a monopoly that stifles
> innovation.  Look I'm sorry you don't feel like mercurial is worth
> your time, but that is your issue.  We as a project are very happy
> with it.

That's fair enough. But it *is* a barrier to adoption, and you have
decided that the *benefit* you get from it is worth having that
barrier. I may go and look at the video, if I can find the time, to see
the details of your pro/con analysis there.

And yes, it's about choices.

In the *general* case, I find that there is a *massive* correlation
between projects which make the choice to use esoteric version control
systems, and projects which make all kind of other bizarre (no pun
intended) decisions.

That correlation isn't really there for Pidgin, but it does mean that
in general if a project is using a weird VCS it's just a hint that even
if I *did* overcome that, I wasn't going to much like working on the
project anyway. And I'm not the only one who's found that.

So when people look at a project in bzr or hg or arch or other random
things, it isn't *just* the initial technical hurdle (I mean, how hard
*is* it to do 'git clone hg::https://bitbucket…') that puts them off.
It's just a generally bad "first impression".
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