To answer your question (the thread topic): yes, they would.
I speak for myself: I was going trough some virtuemart PHP code this week and noticed a couple of minor spelling errors, and thought let's create a patch.... and ultimately ended up here:
http://dev.virtuemart.net/projects/virtuemart/wiki/Setting_up_a_Development_Environment
And there is no bug tracker.
So this seems just too much for some spelling errors, barriers need to be lower. And Github specifically takes care of this (issue tracking, merging, forking etc.).
You can send the patch here, and write a pn to me. If your patch is nice, you get my skype, when you delivered 3-5 times a nice patch you get direct access. Take a look on the size of our installers, and you will notice that vm3 is a lot smaller than vm2. Code is mainly a matter of quality, not quantity. Adobe for example has a development team of 50 people and say that more people wont enhance the quality. Similar here. There are only 3 people (beside me) who committ code, which has not obvious errors. I have to fix almost any patch. It is very often so, that people send me a patch, tell me that they worked an hour on it and I fix this patch 2 hours. of course happy for the ideas in it, these patches are important ... Svn is almost the same as git. So when you have committ rights, it is the almost the same handling. You can even create patches for SVN with GIT. You can also use the svn with your GIT. So actually, you can use GIT with VM. The pull request is done manually at begin, thats all!
The barrier is not svn or git. The barrier is that VM works with a code guard, me. At begin the svn was almost open for anyone. We had a lot of teams and that leads to the problem that people become lazy in groups. Actually nothing happened. We had exactly this problem
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_loafing Please read it, really! It is very, very important to understand it. Our code enhances all the time, check the svn. For example we left joomla actually far behind us. That may sound arrogant, but we have here and there another ideology than them. And so from our view point we are ahead, but you may understand better, when you see VM for WP. For example from our view point, unit tests are useless for php. There are more and more people seeing it the same (also in the joomla groups). The problem in php code is that there no units like in a desktop programm, which got designed by software engineers. I start with Java applications for desktop. I know what I am talking about and unit tests are not the right concept for php scripts. We do instead "acceptance tests"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acceptance_testing . We do it automated with Selenium and by test users (check the download numbers for the vm3.0.18.x versions!
http://dev.virtuemart.net/projects/virtuemart/filesThe bug tracker is the forum. I wrote often the reasons for it, I think there is even a FAQ about. The main problem are the users. A tracker is a nice tool, when you have developers as users, which fill the tracker with qualified tickets. But when you have people like here, which start with virtuemart as their first webpage, you need a lot people cleaning the tracker, all the time. We have a tracker, we can reactivate it. But we need moderators and there is the problem. The moderators must be highskilled and all the time in contact with the developers, or read almost any ticket. This is very time consuming. The next problem is that people start to write in the forum, then they would need another login for the tracker and a "redirect post". There is no tracker for smf. It would mean to migrate a more than 10 year old forum. I know you say "if you would use a tracker from begin on, people wouldnt use the forum", but that is not true, because most people look for a simple informel contact and wont use a tracker. So from my viewpoint, a tracker makes a lot more work and we wont gain a lot by it.
Yes, I can create a patch with patch(1) or diff(1) and email/post them but that is not how you want to do things anymore (this is not the 90s).
This barrier is on purpose. Check the post of jenkinhill he explains it very nice from the viewpoint of a webagency. Or just take the security leak in joomla in october 2016. Please read here
http://www.fionacoulter.com/blog/improving-quality-control/it was introduced by a guy who committed only ONE time. This is very suspicious, please read the article of Fiona. This cannot happen in vm! Two reasons. First this guy would not be able to just do a request and some people take a look and say, okey, lets use it. Of course Joomla has also kind of code guards, but they work different. They just look on the tracker, the arguments in the ticket and thats it, mainly. In my case I would take a close look, notice that the whole form isnt used and write a post, "lets remove this deprecated controller!". Second the guy had to contact me, personal. That means he had to hack me. Real shop owners are not interested in the last fancy stuff. They want reliable secure software. Btw joomla is a good example why it is not good to use GIT. From my point of view and I worked a lot with j3 code latly (for wp), j3 has a lower code quality. I think 30% of the code is unused garbage. Legacy, deprecated stuff. The reason is that there is no dirigent and they just do what they want to.
When you really want to enhance VirtueMart, you will notice, yes, there is a door, there is a guard. Yes, but when you are inside, all doors are open. We can be more open, because we have a guard. Do you get the idea?
But apart from my opinion (which you may disagree with) when even old tools like emacs move to git (https://www.masteringemacs.org/article/emacss-switch-to-git) or when Bitkeeper (a source code version control system: previously used to host the kernel and the direct reason for the development of git) creates a presence on github itself (!!) https://github.com/bitkeeper-scm/bitkeeper) it should be very clear where you project should be to attract developers.
We had a git and the user who opened it, closed it. He finished his examen and then stopped it. I said to him, yeah, of course, open a Git. We could reorganise the whole thing, some people use GIT and send the final patch to me. But actually, I never got any patch by the GITlers.
And that last part is the real question. It is not about svn vs. git. It is about, does Virtuemart want/need new/more developers to push development forward or does the Virtuemart core team think this is not needed (also entirely possible). But if the answer to the former question is yes, than git (and specifically github) is where you need to be. Go to where the developers are.
Of course we would like to have more developers, but we need skilled developers. The joomla leak of october is a perfect example, what a wrong "fix" can do. Some weeks ago, I had a customer who had trouble with the new getMyOrder function. He wrote a "fix" in 1 hour. I worked on this function some days (over the years). And the function got changed, maybe 20 times. Even when my programming skills are 5 times worse than his skills it is very unlikely that he fixed it. It is a lot more likely that he just stumbled over a security issue of his plugin and disabled the blocking security lines. Of course, it works for him, yes. and it is also almost "secure" due obscurity (no one knows about), but very, very dangerous to use fixes like that for the core.
I had it really endless times, that small simple patches created bugs later, even they got checked by me and tested by webagencies and endusers. We do the release and someone has suddenly a bug and you check the code and notice, "yes it is a bug and not a misused feature". But joomla guys wouldnt fix this Bug, because they would say "was not promised". I just see a user who got used to a unintended feature and we destroyed it by another feature (in this example it was a simple feature, some people used the payment fee as skonto, with a minus value. But someone added the "feature" that the payment fee cannot be below zero (as fallback) and destroyed the other feature). Or just the new category ajax feature. The guy wrote some hours on it.... it worked for him, I added it, worked for me,.. .and 1-2 weeks later it created days of additional work.
and just today, more than a month later, a team member reported again problem with category ajax. The idea to solve it is simple, but it takes at least 30 minutes to write it. It is only important for people who moved the asset folder and to an update, OMG. lol. Or the added feature for legacy layouts,... today was again an idea which creates work for 30 minutes. :-) you cannot imagine.
And one additional thing. A lot people just post some lines, which should be changed and I do that without any discussion. So a lot people got their fixes into the core without even knowing GIT. In joomla for example it is the opposite. When you post a perfect fix in the forum, it wont get part of the code. Someone must do a pull request according to the rules. So on the other hand, we are a lot more flexible than other projects using GIT.
To summarize:
- We use the codeguard princip by decision and experience
- When we trust you, VM is open as GIT.
- We also implement patches, which do not fullfill the formal standards.
- We even fix not qualified fixes, when the community member has not the skill, else we ask for a bit more effort. :-)
-
https://people.redhat.com/rjones/how-to-supply-code-to-open-source-projects/So when you really mean it serious, nothing will stop you.
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