Move part of macports infrastructure to GitHub

[Joshua Root]

On 2014-3-17 05:42 , Sean Farley wrote:
> 
> If MacPorts really wants to switch to distributed version control, then
> I would suggest Mercurial. I have experimented with using Mercurial for
> the MacPorts repo and found that the mercurial UI is much, much more
> consistent than git coming from Subversion.

I would certainly agree with that.

However I would also agree with what Landon said here:
<https://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-dev/2013-September/024252.html>

Rainer also did a great job of explaining why moving to github is a bad
idea earlier in the thread. Much the same applies to bitbucket.

I should note that I've used both git and hg for real work, and a modern
DVCS certainly has its advantages. But that said, I really haven't felt
like I was being restricted by svn while working on MacPorts. In fact,
sometimes being able to check out a single file or directory deep in the
tree comes in handy.

If the majority of contributors really find that they are being held
back by svn, I guess I would support moving our repos to hg. We could at
least add an official hg mirror.

But the OP said that the thread was about github and the convenience of
pull requests, not git as such. If the problem is that people find it's
too much trouble to svn diff and attach the output to a ticket, maybe
client side automation is the solution. We have a script to apply a
patch straight from a Trac URL, so why not one to create a ticket and
attach a patch. It would be more complicated certainly, but if saving
that handful of clicks gets more people involved, I guess it's worth it.

- Josh