New developer concern - why a not Git

[till]

The only real problem I struck was missing libnss libs in a jailkit chroot so I could <ahem> use git and pull some scripts from Github.

You should be able to add it in the jailkit settings under System > server config as additional dependency. If thats not enough, define a new app class in the jailkit configuration and refer to it under System > Server config

I was going to use Zpanel (primarily because it's Github based) but the codebase is somewhat over engineered and not as mature as ISPConfig so it looks like I'm in for the long haul now and that partly explains why I am so passionate about using Github. I want to see this codebase improve as quickly as possible and, aside from the people that actually do the work, Github is the next best accelerator from cranium to the real world.

A large part of ISPConfigs maturity comes from the reason that we handle things a bit old school. We had several contributors that wanted to push ispconfig forwards faster e.g. before we released 3.0.3, it ended in a complete disaster and took us about 6 moths of work to stabilize the system again so instead of being faster, we had a massive slowdown in development speed, and it was not the fault of the code management system. As you might imagine, the guys which caused the problems were not there anymore at the time it came to fix the issues they caused, so the corde devs had to do it and were not able to add any new features to ispconfig for half a year.

We are doing the ispconfig development as a long term effort to develop the best controlpanel on the market. I'am working on it for more then ten years now if we count ispconfig 2 and I plan to do it still in 10+ years. I've seen a lot of panels rise and fall in that time and if you plan to setup a company or larger server infrastructure on a panel you should also take in account how likely it is that the developers will support it in futureor if they are just hobbyists which wrote a shiny gui. You might have got me wrong in the above post, I did not ask for more contributions in general. I explained why it is difficult for a complex project like ispconfig to handle more contributions and how to get the right contributions which dont block core devs with bugfixing only. So this is more then git fanboys vs. old school programmers.

Today it is hip to use github and in 3 years everyone wants to us the next big hyped platform to manage the code and then we are caught in the github enviroment with all feature requests etc. A few years ago, sourceforge was hip and what if you used it to manage all your bug trackersetc, then you might be lost now.

So we have modernized our infrastructure and will modernize it even more in future, updated the bugtracker etc. and there is no general decision against git or github for this project, we just have to keep long time goals in mind as well. For example I checked out gitlab lately as it allows a functionality similar to github but without having to rely on their promise to not charge us for their service and without data / vendor lock in.