What's the point of the garage?
 

I've asked this question a few times on the maemo IRC channel, but have never gotten a reply. If you have developed a Maemo 5 application, and if you have put it in Extras, is there any reason to have an associated Maemo garage page for it? One can get the the source code from the package page that is created by the autobuilder, so you don't need to upload the source code to the garage to make it available. The garage offers discussion lists, etc, but I've never seen those show any activity. So if you plan to submit your app to Extras, should one just ignore the garage?

Re: What's the point of the garage?
 

Back in the old days, t.m.o was internettablettalk and so some people might have used those garage features. These days I use the garage only for hosting the code. I'm also now dual-hosting with github to make contributions even easier.

For the sake of anyone who wants to look at your code and even more so for anyone who might want to contribute, please do more than releasing source packages. Back it with SVN on garage or GIT on garage or github.

Re: What's the point of the garage?
 

I'm sorry to be dense but, why? The package you upload has the source code, and everything that autotoools needs to build the package. It has the AUTHORS and other extra documentation files. If you download the source code from the page autobuilder creates, you are assured of getting the source code that actually creates the app in Extras (or Extras Testing, etc), while the garage might have some other version of the code. What extra functionallity is available if you also upload the code to the garage?

Re: What's the point of the garage?
 

Version Control Software makes life a lot easier for you as an individual developer. It is a great form of undo or figuring out what caused things to break or slow down.

For working with other people it lowers the barrier to entry for making a change. They can browse the source code. It makes merging code a whole lot easier because of the history involved.

There are a lot more reasons than those but to sum it up, just do it. It makes it difficult to work with you such that the source code being available is only good for forking. I and I would assume some other developers would skip over providing any assistance without it. There are many articles all over the internet that you can find (Joel on Software might be the most famous high level one) about revision control being one of the most fundamental tools of software development.

Oh and the garage provides web hosting. People don't want to have to read every talk post to know what the status of you package is, where the download page is, where the package testing page is, where the thread is, where the source code is, any help you might provide, etc. I've since moved all of mine over to the wiki though to (in theory) allow other people to help keep it up to date).