Cross-posted to the Share Extras Development Group today.
Share Extras will be moving to a new platform in the next few weeks. The new platform will be GitHub, with the version control obviously provided by Git instead of Subversion, which is used at present.
There are many reasons for moving to Git from Subversion. I’ve spent a while reviewing the project issue list this week and it’s clear to me that there are many enhancement requests which may not be appropriate to make in the main Extras code base, or are simply not achievable within the project due to people’s time constraints.
Git will enable the wider community to fork individual any add-on as they feel the need to. I hope this will lead to more contributions back to the main project and foster greater collaboration (and perhaps a bit of competition?) with others.
Specifically, there is also the need to improve on the localisation of add-ons in a consistent manner, and there are some great tools available for doing that based on Git.
Whilst I had originally intended to simply migrate to a new Git VCS within Google Code, the frequent downtime and increasingly poor feature set and user interface when compared to other providers has led me to conclude that it is not a viable platform for future development.
In contrast, GitHub supports the notion of projects within an overall organisation much better (I have already registered Share Extras as an organisation) and has some great options for improving our documentation using cool standards such as Markdown.
I propose to migrate the current trunk codeline (and perhaps the 1.0 branch should time allow) at the end of August. There are several things that committers need to do before then, in order to help make it a success, such as ensuring that they have a README.md file in all their projects (this will become the main source of documentation, rather than the wiki), and helping to close down any issues that remain open on Google Code (issues will not be migrated over).
As always, if you have any feedback, please let me know. Otherwise I will be in touch with the main committers separately in the coming week or so.