Re: Our official home page and logo for the Git project

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Apr 12, 2014, 12:05 UTC
Message-ID: <20140412120548.GC14820@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqr453sm76.fsf@gitster.dls.corp.google.com>

On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 12:25:17PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> The mention of "dev.git-scm.com" gives me a mixed feeling.  The
> chasm between the developer community and casual end-users who know
> about Git primarily via their perusal of git-scm.com is one of the
> root causes of this confusion.

I do not think you can get rid of that split, though. Different people want different content from a site. Somebody who wants to download and run git does not care about our Summer of Code ideas page. Somebody who wants to get a logo does not care about seeing an in-progress logo contest, or discussion on which logos people are working on.

Historically most of the "dev" information has been on the mailing list. But sometimes it is more helpful to have a web page showing the "current state" of some content (e.g., the list of SoC ideas) and just periodically update it, rather than having each reader assemble the current state from whatever has been posted to the list. We have used the kernel.org wiki for this in the past. What I was suggesting is that those things could fall under the name "dev.git-scm.com" (which could even just point to the k.org wiki, or some other wiki, or a site to which many devs had push access).

The wiki has _also_ been used for user-facing content. E.g., the list of tools that build on git. That kind of content would make sense to me on git-scm.com, and perhaps it could be ported there to give it better exposure.

> The one on the left-top corner was one of the alternatives that
> received favorable reactions from multiple people (I am not sure if
> there was a clear "majority" though) submitted when we briefly had a
> poll to come up with an updated logo.

Do you have a link to the poll or its results? I could not find one in the list archive. Not that it necessarily matters to the current discussion, but I was interested for historical curiosity.

I have also seen that logo receive unfavorable reactions from people, but my recollection is probably biased because I was one of those people. :)

Show 7 quoted lines

> In any case, this motion is not about "let's declare the logo we see
> on git-scm.com today as _the_ official one".  It is not about "that
> logo on git-scm.com sucks; let's come up with a better one".  People
> are welcome to do that discussion elsewhere, and I do not mind a
> repository of contestants created somewhere, but personally I think
> the project is too mature for that and it is too late, even though
> the "bleeding-red fork" logo may not be my favorite.

Thanks, this is what I was trying to say in my earlier message.

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> The motion is about this:
> 
>     Outside people, like the party who approached us about putting
>     our logo on their trinket, seem to associate that logo we see on
>     git-scm.com today with our project, but we never officially said
>     it was our logo (we did not endorse that git-scm.com is our
>     official home page, either, for that matter).
> 
>     It is silly for us to have to say "Ehh, that is a logo that was
>     randomly done and slapped on git-scm.com which is not even our
>     official home page, and the logo is licensed CC-BY by somebody
>     else.  Go talk to them.", every time such a request comes.
> 
>     Please help us by letting us answer "Yup, that is a logo (among
>     others) that represents our project, and we are OK with you
>     using it to help promote our project" instead.
> 
> That is what I meant by "our official logo" in the first message.
> 
> So,... seconds?

I do not know if I count, as I am listed as one of the proposers in your original message. But yes, I agree with this.

-Peff