[Foundation-l] No tail-lights. What do we do now? (was Call for referendum)

[Alec Conroy]

On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 10:35 AM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Adapting MediaWiki to git has been tried a few times. I suspect the
> problem is that the software deeply assumes a database behind it, not
> a version-controlled file tree. Wrong model for an easy fix to
> MediaWiki itself.

Yeah, I don't mean it 'quite' that literally.   I agree that literally
incorporating git would be unlikely to be a simple solution-- I mostly
mean 'incorporate the lessons of git'.
A lot of those lessons could be implemented with existing software if
the culture changes.   Sandbox articles, for example, would be trivial
to implement-- just stop deleting them.    New project creation is
about to get a LOT easier with Incubator extension.   We don't yet
have the technology to do distributed hosting, but we could do some
sort of 'donated funds' hosting for specialist wikis that we might not
feel comfy actually using our regular donations for. (or, we could
decide the cost of such specialist wikis is negligible and just host
them ourselves with our own donations..  case by case).

The biggest barriers are cultural, not technological.  We all 'grew
up' hearing that "forks are evil", but funny story, turns out forks
aren't only not evil, they're a huge advantage in collaborative
document creation.   Forks are only evil because we haven't learned
the lessons of git yet, so we don't have a 'merge' yet.

Alec