Google Code Now Supports User Clones for Mercurial | Hacker News Reader

Google Code Now Supports User Clones for Mercurial

googlecode.blogspot.com

24 pointsdurin425 comments

I very much appreciate their use of the word 'clone' instead of 'fork', and the focus on maintaining the idea of canonical repository and project:

  User clones aren't forks, in the traditional sense,
  where a fork has little intention to contribute back
  to the original project. Rather, the entire purpose
  of a user clone is to allow users to contribute to
  projects without requiring official commit access
  permissions.

I was thinking of migrating some projects to github for this feature, but instead I think I'll just switch to Mercurial on Google Code.

Yes, this is a really important point. A lot of the "OMG git is so cool" early adopters seemed to go off on how great forking things is without making this critical distinction between a 'code' fork' and a 'project' fork. The first is simply a technical thing - the latter is a human thing.

Indiscriminately creating random project forks without contributing back is "bad open source citizenship".

github killer?

Hahaha

Given that GitHub goes after Git users, and Google Code supports only Mercurial, I somewhat doubt it. I'd be more concerned for Bitbucket--and even there, even after the outages, Bitbucket is simply a vastly superior product to Google Code for 99% of users, in my opinion.

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