[davidw]

No it hasn't. It helps, it's a nice tool, but it does not take the place of human communication, which is essential. You can't just send someone a 'pull request' without explaining why you want to do it, what it's for and so on.

And you should really be doing that in a publicly archived, visible place.

[jrockway]

And you should really be doing that in a publicly archived, visible place.

The commit message.

[davidw]

Which is why traffic has stopped on the linux kernel mailing list, despite being long time users of git? Nope. All serious open source projects have some sort of discussion area. Even github lets you comment on commits, but that's not quite as convenient to read for most people as a publicly visible mailing list/forum/whatever.

Git is a nice tool, but you can't take things to extremes. It is not a substitute for actual discussion. What happens when the patch is 'pretty good', but not quite right and both people are willing to work on it? It just gets discussed in commit messages? No, it goes to a mailing list, especially when it's a larger project with many interested parties. This is pretty elementary open source stuff:-/

Where you're completely correct is that git and github make it easier to contribute 'at the margins'. In the sense that what once may have simply lain idle on one's own hard drive is easier to simply throw at some project in the hopes that they can do something useful with it.

[jrockway]

When your project's size warrants it, you can switch from pull requests to an off-site mailing list. But most projects never get there, and so pull requests are quite useful for the long tail.

I remember back in the sourceforge day, most projects died before they ever got a mailing list, CVS account, web page, wiki, bug tracker, ..., all setup. Now, reasonable defaults are provided for you, and you can focus on writing the code. Once your project has a bunch of contributers that are all working on time-consuming projects... then you can invest some time in moving away from the defaults. But if you project is like most and has 3 users, you won't have to waste your time.

[davidw]

github is without doubt an improvement over SF, and makes it easier to contribute to smaller projects.

> I remember back in the sourceforge day, most projects died before they ever got a mailing list, CVS account, web page, wiki, bug tracker, ..., all setup.

What happened a lot is that people thought they were going to do some great open source project, registered the project, then never did anything with it. This can happen anywhere, really, although it's probably less prominent on github, because a repository with nothing in it is pretty ridiculous.

Also, it's amazingly easy to set up a Google Group, even though they have some known issues.

Anyway, where I'm going with this is merely that putting it on github does not make open source magically 'work', and people need to pay attention to the human (communication, etc...) side of things too. Github is an improvement in many ways.