Getting Adium onto Github

[Jon Chambers]

> I worry about the GPL nature of Adium being unclear to contributors and Github's pull requests, while easy to use, make it very, very difficult to confirm that a contributor is aware of the licensing situation.

I don't quite understand the problem here (which isn't to say there
isn't one!); couldn't you just post a comment on the request saying
"please confirm that you understand the licensing situation before we
merge this?" It seems like that would neatly bundle the patch with a
statement from the author.

-Jon

On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 6:13 PM, Colin Barrett
<colin at springsandstruts.com> wrote:
> On Feb 12, 2013, at 9:57 AM, Thijs Alkemade <me at thijsalkema.de> wrote:
>
>> I'm not against also running a Github mirror, there are tools that should
>> allow lossless conversion between the two. However, last time I tried those
>> (https://github.com/xnyhps/adium), the repository went from ~700 MB to
>> 2.5GB. Anyone who would want to use Github to quickly send a pull request to
>> Adium would probably give up trying to clone that. I could have a look at
>> what causes that enormous increase in size, but unless we decide to drop
>> a lot of history and create a new repository without binary frameworks it
>> will still end up quite large.
>
> Some things:
>
> - Github has a soft repo limit of 1GB. A bunch of forks of a 2.5GB Adium would probably not make them happy (https://help.github.com/articles/what-is-my-disk-quota)
>
> - As part of trying to fix our external binary files problem, we could put the binary files in an external repo, hosted by us, and write a script to download the correct versions after checkout. (The script would be versioned, which would keep old versions of the source available. And if the directory where library verisons were downloaded to was marked as ignored by Git, it could function as a local cache making offline usage less painful.) (I also have ideas about some simple pre-processor things we can do to make the "check out adium, try to build" workflow at least have a helpful error message.)
>
> - The above would mean starting over, again, on a new repository. Frustrating because now we've got history in even more places.
>
> - I worry about the GPL nature of Adium being unclear to contributors and Github's pull requests, while easy to use, make it very, very difficult to confirm that a contributor is aware of the licensing situation.
>
> Would it be worth it? I don't really know. But attracting new contributors to Adium is certainly important, especially at the moment.
>
> Let me know if there's anything I can do to help.
>
> -Colin
>
>