Re: Official Git Homepage change? Re: git-scm.com

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jul 26, 2008, 04:09 UTC
Message-ID: <7v4p6dnv5k.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20080726020951.GV32184@machine.or.cz>

Petr Baudis <pasky@suse.cz> writes:

Show 11 quoted lines

> .... Of course, I would be transferring the control of the homepage
> from my hands so I would like to poll the community about how do people
> feel about this - opinion of core Git contributors would be especially
> welcome...
> ...
>   - The new site is affiliated with a commercial entity - GitHub.
> The website maintainer also has commercial interest in some published
> Git learning materials, which might generate certain conflict of
> interests; we must trust them that they handle this well.
>   - Both GitHub and Scott seem to be rather distanced from the "core"
> Git development community. This might or might not be an issue.

These two are directly related. They might be friendly and well-meaning folks, but I agree that they haven't earned our trust yet.

But I do not think it matters that much.

The thing is, git.or.cz may have been the closest thing to the "official" homepage we have had, but that is not because Linus or I or Shawn declared the site is official and/or that the site is trustworthy. It was because you put efforts preparing the contents worthy to be one-stop shop for git related information, back when there was no such thing. And the members of the comminity found it a good site. And you have the wiki there, where there truly have been community participation to enhance the contents.

For me personally, pages outside the wiki have never felt like "the official git homepage", not because the contents you prepared were inadequate, but because I did not see much community participation to help enrich it.

So I wish the new site success, but the definition of success from my point of view is not how many random visitors it will attract, but how well the site makes the contributors (both to git software itself, and to the site's contents) feel welcomed. Maybe in time it will become successful enough by _my_ definition of success, and I may recommend kernel.org folks to point at it from http://git.kernel.org/ (link with text "overview") if/when that happens, and I may start mentioning them in the "Note". We'll see.

>   The negatives section writeup is longer, but in fact I think the
> positives win here; I also have a bit of bad conscience about not giving
> git.or.cz the amount of time it would deserve...

Let me thank you for maintaining not just git.or.cz/ but also repo.or.cz/ and the wiki. I personally never visited the "Homepage" but the repositories and the wiki are valuable services you gave back to the community.

It's also somewhat interesting to observe that several people I have never heard of in the git circle are simultaneously doing new git books, apparently never asking for much technical advice from core git people, by the way.