~petersanchez/wikimain

3c481ebbc9e8e54d5223e4f8771e52803b0a3c16 — Peter Sanchez 4 years ago 1799b36
Updating contributing doc
1 files changed, 45 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)

M contributing.md
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# Why?

The main reason is BitBucket deciding [end support for Mercurial][bbhg]. This
left a very bad taste in our mouth and we've spent way too many hours trying to
figure out what we should do next.

After much thought we agreed it's best to take back control of our data. Not
just with our code hosting but also our email, calendars, contacts, etc. We
never want to be in this situation again and honestly there is no reason we
can't host our own stuff (we're pretty experienced sysadmins after all).

Now we can do things *exactly how we want to*. 

[bbhg]: https://bitbucket.org/blog/sunsetting-mercurial-support-in-bitbucket

## Why not migrate to Git(hub|lab), etc.

We strongly prefer Mercurial over Git. We have nothing against Git at all and
we use it daily but for all of our own repo's we just prefer Mercurial. We
don't see that changing anytime in the near future either.

No we're not going to engage in a flame war here. Git is great and you should
always use the tools that make you more productive, happy, etc.

## But... What about forks and pull requests?

We realize for a certain subset of developers this method may seem old
fashioned. It may even seem complicated. The truth is, it's actually not
complicated at all. It's just different than what you're used to.


@@ 213,6 237,27 @@ While it may seem like the whole world follows the GitHub workflow, we'd wager
that far more open source contributions happen via email than pull requests
every day.

## Trusted collaboration

> Software communities don’t just write code together. They brainstorm feature ideas, help new users get their bearings, and collaborate on best ways to use the software.

We couldn't have said it better ourselves. That's taken from the GitHub
announcement of their new [discussions feature][ghdis]. Of course to use that
feature you have to be on their website.

Using mailing lists, you can use whatever your favorite email client is and
interact whenever you'd like. Even offline, as long as you've got your email
downloaded. Mailing lists are tried and trusted. Basically as old as email
itself and still in use by practically every possible industry you can name.

Why? Because they work, they're convenient, there's basically no learning
curve, and you can use whatever email client you're most comfortable with.

This is a huge advantage and helps keep the community more accessible and
diverse.

[ghdis]: https://github.blog/2020-05-06-new-from-satellite-2020-github-codespaces-github-discussions-securing-code-in-private-repositories-and-more/#discussions

# Conclusion

See, that isn't so bad. We hope this helps show you how to quickly contribute