Mapping SVN usernames to git

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

as I said in my initial post, I myself am often a bit conservative 
regarding "fancy new technology". I stayed with Apache when the cool 
kids switched to nginx a decade ago, and who knows what they're using 
now, Apache still works for me. IPv6? It's the first thing I switch off 
when there's anything funny going on with networking. And so on. I'm 
generally unwilling to switch to something new "just because it is now 
en vogue". (Yep, still using SVN for some things at work - a simple git 
repo for others, gitea for some, and GitHub too...)

Hence I totally understand where Dirk is coming from!

OSM, too, has seen various waves of "cool new tech" come and go. There 
was a time when everyone wanted to somehow switch OSM to "NoSQL" and 
when you asked them why the response was a vague "it scales better" or 
somesuch, and so on.

The important difference is that if you want to involve many people, you 
will have more success if you do "what most people do". Even if there 
were solid reasons why Trac+SVN was technologically superior, or if the 
2.5 people working on the source today prefer Trac+SVN, it would STILL 
make sense to switch to GitHub.

And Dirk, I can't help but agree with the others that every single time 
you say "I have enough work already", you are adding momentum to the 
"switch to GitHub" train. It's not going to make your load lighter by 
itself, but you *will* get more helping hands in the long run.

The thing is, the standard volunteer contributor doesn't FIRST decide 
they want to become a JOSM contributor and then go "ok, let me see what 
I have to learn to do that". Sure, it would be great if you had people 
committed like that. But in reality, people will start by making a tiny 
hit-and-run pull request to scratch an itch. Because they're on GitHub, 
JOSM is on GitHub, and they don't have to look up how to contact the 
maintainer and what patch format the maintainer wants - they just fix 
their thing, make a pull request, and that's it. Some of these will be 
rubbish and the maintainer will reject them, but some of them will also 
be good and you'll wave them through. And then some people will make 
their second and third pull request. And find that it is rewarding to 
work on the editor used by tens of thousands of OSM contributors. And do 
more work.

Some luck is involved, some randomness, there's no guarantee that you'll 
broaden the developer base with a move to GitHub. But there is pretty 
much a guarantee that you will NOT broaden the developer base by 
sticking with SVN.

Yes, SVN is good enough for some things. As I said, I still use it at 
work (where I don't have to attract volunteers to use it). But SVN is 
not good enough anymore for a modern Open Source project, and I want 
JOSM to be a modern Open Source project.

If you think that switching to GitHub is too much work for you, let's 
make a list of what is required, and find volunteers who commit to doing 
that.

Cheers
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"