Why Do People "Watch" Code? A Short Survey for Open Source Devs

phark.posterous.com

33 points·pharkmillups··6 comments

The presenter at the meet up last night watches projects on Github as "a poor man's bookmark." Time for Github to implement other lists.

That's exactly how I use it as well.

What I'd like to see is a "★/☆" for a repo, branch, or commit. Similar to the way you can ★ a question or answer on StackOverflow.

I definitely do this. If I'm actually "watching" a repo, such as tenderlove's ARel repo, I'll put the RSS feed into my reader. Might be a little clunky to do it that way, but that's basically how I get all my other news.

I frequently watch code because it is one of a set of projects. I don't care about that project specifically, but I like to see it is active, make sure they aren't going in a direction that will mean trouble could be headed downstream to what I actually care about and so on.

I also watch projects that I think could amount to a big deal, but are currently in the concept phase. That way as they get going and start solving a problem I know how it goes.

Finally I watch projects that are solving problems I may have insight into -- so I see places I can contribute.

In all these cases I don't fork because I am not engaged enough to maintain an active fork, since they you must manually pull the upstream master regularly... annoying if I'm not doing it because I'm involved. Then I can just clone from the head easily when it is time to fork or modify the code.

Is there any way you can make the results public so we can see them, or are you going to wait before sharing?

I'm planning on building the suspense until enough responses come in for a follow up post to make sense. When that happens, I'll make sure to share everything.

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