GitHub repo for Melee Codes and Documentation

[pk_melee]

Rather than the public Google Drive, it would be nice to move all code and document related hosting to GitHub.

https://github.com/

Their code collaboration tools are top notch, as is their formatting for documentation. Git also makes it extremely easy to watch the development of a project over time.

Are there reasons for using Google Drive that I'm not accounting for?

What are your thoughts on moving to GitHub?

 

[Dan Salvato]

I would be down to use GitHub. I agree that it would be better for this purpose. I have little personal experience with it, so if you'd like to get it set up and arrange a system then that would be cool. If you'd like, you can contact me on Skype about this: dansalvato

 

[Dariencove]

GitHub is pretty boss.

It makes it a lot simpler to track changes, and also allow people to collaborate on projects and have newcomers show suggestions through pull requests.

The only issue with GitHub that I can think of off the top of my head is that it doesn't really track changes in binary files in a convenient way. You'd have to have whatever those files are in a 'human-readable' format and manually convert them afterwards.

 

[Dan Salvato]

GitHub is pretty boss.

It makes it a lot simpler to track changes, and also allow people to collaborate on projects and have newcomers show suggestions through pull requests.

The only issue with GitHub that I can think of off the top of my head is that it doesn't really track changes in binary files in a convenient way. You'd have to have whatever those files are in a 'human-readable' format and manually convert them afterwards.

We really don't have any binary files to track anyway.

 

[Dariencove]

So you wouldn't be using this for tracking any .dat files?

 

[jbvh]

There is git-annex/fat and so on if that became an issue.

 

[Dan Salvato]

So you wouldn't be using this for tracking any .dat files?

No. Those are not only illegal to distribute, but this would be for code and documentation, not game files.

 

[LandonRobinson]

Github makes the most sense for a project of this type, especially being open source. I'll definitely be taking a look and contributing how I can...

 

[Dan Salvato]

I was thinking about this. I think we should be looking more towards collaborative note-sharing platforms rather than a version control platform. We're not building a product or application, we're just gathering a bunch of text documentation that people individually work on. I think tags, searchability, communication, and instant change reflection is more valuable to have.

I haven't put much research into note sharing platforms, so I don't know what's out there that would best fit our needs. The ones I at least know of are Evernote, OneNote, and Slack. I kind of want to look around Slack to see what it has to offer, especially since it looks like it's ready to accommodate coders anyway. Has anyone here used it before?

edit: Just made an account on Slack, it actually looks sick. I'm going to give it a couple test laps with a friend or two.
edit 2: Slack seems super useful for active developers but doesn't really serve as a public documents platform, since the info isn't public. I would call that a deal-breaker, but I'm definitely excited to use Slack for something down the line, and I would highly recommend checking it out.

edit 3: Similarly, OneNote seems to be awesome for organizing project notes, but it would be most useful if a team were using it for active development rather than for public sharing.

edit 4: Evernote almost wins but I'm not sure if people would be cool with the lack of hierarchy. It's simply Notebook -> All your notes. I think you're expected to stay organized with tags, which probably works, but I'm not sure people would enjoy that kind of system.


More thoughts:

As far as publishing notes goes, I think it's best for people to have a lot of control over what they publish. It means that the published notes are distinguished, organized, and easy to follow, while the working directory is used for active development, and other interested developers could jump into the fray as they choose.

This does make Google Drive a good platform for well-documented, published notes and codes. What Google Drive *doesn't* do well is help collaborators work on things together. That is, Drive is simply a good publishing platform.

I think Slack is by far the most useful tool for active collaboration on work-in-progress code and documentation. I think it would be a decent solution to use Slack for active development/collaboration and Google Drive for publishing complete notes.

Slack allows you to create "channels" which have a chat room, as well as a file directory for you to share and edit text files. You receive notifications when your name is mentioned, and you get to join/leave any channels you want, which is cool as you feel like jumping in and out of individual projects. Again, I'm going to try it out with a couple people and see how it works as an active development tool, which I'm interested in.

 

[Pac-Man Vs.]

GitHub is excellent for collaboration. The downside of your plan is that the development happens in private. That is a loss for any aspiring developer. What's cool about GitHub is anyone can look in and see what actual developers are saying about their project. They can understand what they tried and what didn't work, rather than just see the final project. The alternative implies that developers are superhumans who never make mistakes. GitHub would create a more welcoming environment for novice hackers.

GitHub has better support for hack-related documents. Google Drive / docs is good for standard word processing, but that's not exactly what's going on with Melee hacking.

GitHub's issue tracker is also excellent. There can be threads for each idea & concept, or people can make wiki pages. It's all very nice.