[dpdk-dev] GitHub sandbox for the DPDK community

[Mcnamara, John]

Hi,

It is always difficult to sell change unless there is a majority
in favour of it. If the project was already on GitHub and someone
was proposing to move to a ML/Patch workflow then we would
probably see as much resistance.

Here are some advantages and disadvantage of GitHub from personal
experience of working with projects that were exclusively hosted
there.

Some advantages of GitHub:

* Integrated bug tracker with #num linking of commits to issues
  and issues to commits.

* Inline code reviews of pull requests (PR)s.

* Patches can be viewed in the context of the surrounding code.

* Ability to tag issues/PRs with tags like "Bug", "Documentation"
  and to add them to milestones. This give a project level view
  of the current state of issues/PRs.

* Easy integration and automatic updating with third party tools
  like ReadTheDocs, TravisCI and Coverity. This makes it very
  easy to setup a continuous integration environment.

Personally, I find the third party tool integration the most
compelling feature. It allows you to configure the tools to work
with updates to the repo rather than configuring the repo (via
hooks) to work with the tools. The issue tracker integration is
also very useful.

These features aren't exclusive to GitHub and we could probably
replicate the useful ones into our current workflow (issue
tracking in particular is missing). The advantage that GitHub has
is that these features are already there and fully integrated.

Some disadvantages of using GitHub:

* Issue/PR discussions aren't threaded and in long discussions it
  can be a little unclear who is replying to whom/what.

* If there are a lot of forks with PRs the network tree becomes
  too big and GitHub doesn't display it.

* The fork/PR workflow with rebasing, squashing and "push
  --force" on branches is probably a significant change to most
  people's workflow.

John.
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