[Rd] Why R-project source code is not on Github

[Simon Urbanek]

On Aug 21, 2014, at 6:40 AM, Marc Schwartz <marc_schwartz at me.com> wrote:

> On Aug 21, 2014, at 3:11 AM, Gaurav Sehrawat <igauravsehrawat at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> R-Project is missing something important in regards to its development ,
>> one simply can't ignore Github ,where collaboration is at it's best .
>> 
>> OR If i am wrong is this the correct R-source :
>> https://github.com/wch/r-source
>> 
>> Is anyone thinking to bring R-project org on Github ? Maybe there might be
>> some difficulty while porting its version system to Github .
>> 
>> Just a suggestion .
>> 
>> Thanks
>> Gaurav Sehrawat
>> http://igauravsehrawat.com
> 
> 
> The link you have above is to a read-only mirror (perhaps not the only one) of the R source code that is kept in the official Subversion repo:
> 
>  https://svn.r-project.org/R/
> 
> There are also some documents that describe R's development cycle and related processes:
> 
>  http://www.r-project.org/certification.html
> 
> Your suggestion to move to Github is perhaps based upon a false premise, that the R community at large has the ability to directly post code/patches to the official distribution. We can contribute code and patches, primarily here on R-Devel, to the code base. However, only the members of R Core team (http://www.r-project.org/contributors.html) have write access to the SVN repo above and have to approve any such contributions.
> 

How is this different from Github? Github just makes it much easier to create and post patches to the project - it has nothing to do with write access - typically on Github the community has no write access, either. Using pull requests is certainly much less fragile than e-mails and patches are based on forked branches, so you can directly build the patched version if you want without manually applying the patch - and you see the whole history so you can pick out things logically. You can comment on individual patches to discuss them and even individual commits - often leading to a quick round trip time of revising it.

Cheers,
Simon


> Since the current SVN based system works well for them and provides restricted write access that they can control, there is no motivation to move to an alternative version control system unless they would find it to be superior for their own development processes.
> 
> That being said, there are a number of contributing projects that have packages on CRAN, that do use Github, myself included. There is also R-Forge (https://r-forge.r-project.org), which provides another SVN based platform for community package development.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Marc Schwartz
> 
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