Re: Using GitHub for specification development

Hi Stéphane,

On Nov 9, 2011, at 17:25 , Stéphane Corlosquet wrote:
> The WebID specification [1] has been living on GitHub since its beginnings in July 2010, and has had 6 contributors so far (see network [2]). We actually didn't have IP issues since Manu Sporny had outlined strict requirements for contributing to the spec in the README file.

The current README doesn't have very strong requirements: https://github.com/webid-community/webid-spec/blob/master/README.txt. Is there another one (I'd like to copy from it :).

> I've been acting as the guinea pig for maintaining these repos in sync using the hg-git extension [4] which I run on my local machine and then push to the appropriate remotes (sorry, I'm using git terminology here as I'm not familiar with hg).

So essentially you've been maintaining this manually? Do you have some form of local script to do that that one could run as a cron job?

> It's been working well so far, but the main hurdle is that the W3 one repo per group policy conflicts with the git/github philosophy of cheap repos, so it worked well while we just had the spec, but when we started adding a paper, then an ontology, it became a mess... The natural way of structuring this on github is to create a repo per project, but since we wanted to keep them on the W3 server we had to keep them in the same repo, in sub folders, which defeats the purpose of git repos and feels like we're back in the svn era.

I don't think that that's a strong policy, it seems that the WebApps WG has been putting its specs at the hg root level and not under their group's directory (which is meant for tests).

> I didn't think using branches was a good solution here.

No, indeed it wouldn't be!

-- 
Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon

Received on Thursday, 10 November 2011 11:17:35 UTC