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On Sat, Nov 22, 2014 at 10:49 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan@gmail.com> wrote:

More generally, I'm very, very disappointed to see folks so willing to
abandon fellow community members for the sake of following the crowd.
Perhaps we should all just abandon Python and learn Ruby or JavaScript
because they're better at getting press in Silicon Valley?

That's a really low blow, Nick.

I think these are the facts:

- Hg/Git are equivalent in functionality (at least to the extent that the difference can't be used to force a decision), and ditto for BitBucket/GitHub, with one crucial exception (see below)

- We're currently using Hg for most projects under the PSF umbrella (however, there's https://github.com/python/pythondotorg)

- Moving from Hg to Git is a fair amount of one-time work (converting repos) and is inconvenient to core devs who aren't already used to Git (learning a new workflow)

- Most newer third-party projects are already on GitHub

- GitHub is way more popular than BitBucket and slated for long-term success

But here's the kicker for me: \*A DVCS repo is a social network, so it matters in a functional way what everyone else is using.\*

So I give you that if you want a quick move into the modern world, while keeping the older generation of core devs happy (not counting myself :-), BitBucket has the lowest cost of entry. But I strongly believe that if we want to do the right thing for the long term, we should switch to GitHub. I promise you that once the pain of the switch is over you will feel much better about it. I am also convinced that we'll get more contributions this way.

Note: I am not (yet) proposing we switch CPython itself. Switching it would be a lot of work, and it is specifically out of scope for this discussion.

--

--Guido van Rossum (python.org/\~guido)

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