Why R-project source code is not on Github

As someone who has merged more than a hundred pull requests on Github,
I cannot agree more. Sometimes I can take patches on my mobile phone
while I'm still in bed if they look reasonable and simple enough.
Sometimes the patches are not worth emails back and forth, such as the
correction of typos. I cannot think of anything else that is more
efficient than being able to discuss the patch right in the lines of
diff's.

Regards,
Yihui
--
Yihui Xie <xieyihui at gmail.com>
Web: http://yihui.name


On Thu, Aug 21, 2014 at 10:58 AM, Simon Urbanek
<simon.urbanek at r-project.org> wrote:

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