contrib/ area

As some of you may be aware, I've added contrib/ area to git.git repository. Currently there are git-svn from Eric and gitview from Aneesh.

The intention is to keep interesting tools around git, maybe even experimental ones, to give users an easier access to them, and to give tools wider exposure, so that they can be improved faster.

I am expecting not to touch them myself that much. As far as my day-to-day operation is concerned, contrib/git-svn is owned by Eric and contrib/gitview by Aneesh. I am willing to help if users of these components and the contrib/ subtree "owners" have technical/design issues to resolve, but the initiative to fix and/or enhance things _must_ be on the side of the subtree owners. IOW, I won't be actively looking for bugs and rooms for enhancements in them as the git maintainer -- I may only do so just as one of the users when I want to scratch my own itch. If you have patches to things in contrib/ area, the patch should be first sent to the primary author, and then the primary author should ack and forward it to me (git pull request is nicer). This is the same way as how I treated gitk, so you know the drill.

I expect that things that start their life in the contrib/ area to graduate out of contrib/ once they mature, either by becoming projects on their own, or moving to the toplevel directory. On the other hand, I expect I'll be proposing removal of disused and inactive ones from time to time.

By the way, I have to admit that merging these two were a bit painful for me. They came as text attachments to e-mail messages, and I ended up hand committing with --author flag, while fixing up whitespaces in them [*1*]. I do not want to do that again. So if you have new things to add to the contrib/ area, please first propose it on the list, and after a list discussion proves there are some general interests (it does not have to be a list-wide consensus for a tool targeted to a relatively narrow audience -- for example I do not work with projects whose upstream is svn, so I have no use for git-svn myself), submit a patch to create a subdirectory of contrib/ and put your stuff there.

One final request to Aneesh. Could you send a patch to add a bit of blurb and introductory text in contrib/gitview/README, please? As it stands, it would be hard to get as much exposure as we had hoped by just having it in git.git repository.

[Footnote]

*1* I _am_ picky about whitespaces, and I would encourage people to enable the pre-commit example hook.