FYI if you have a "CONTRIBUTING" or "CONTRIBUTING.md" document at the project root, a neat little info bar "Please read the [contributing] guidelines before proceeding" will show up to anyone filing a bug or a PR.

Not to be flippant, but if you are not going to use pull-requests, what is the benefit of moving to Github? Will you use the issue tracking system?

If not then it just seems like switching to git using the present google code host would suffice from a technical viewpoint.

We will use the GitHub issue tracker, which will allow easy cross references between go issues and other projects on github.

I have to agree that not using pull requests is missing out on the best feature of github. It's the social, low-overhead way to contribute to a repo.

It seems like it must be possible to hook up a bot to github that watches for pull requests and submits them to gerrit... the Juju team has a bot that does that for our Reviewboard integration. It won't work for more complicated workflows that github doesn't support, like dependent branches or whatever, but it lowers the barrier of entry for initial contributors that just want to submit a simple fix. And the more advanced users can just submit directly to our Reviewboard instance if they want the more advanced features.

Also, the public fork on Github is actually a feature - it means others can easily see what you're working on. You need off-site storage for your personal work anyway, right? You're not going to keep it local on your laptop, so you'll need a branch somewhere regardless.

GitHub code review is terrible. I don't blame them for not using pull requests in the least. If not being able to pull is enough to stop people from contributing, how much is their contribution worth?

Why even move to github then?

I think this is a great move. Also, very similar to the setup used for the OpenStack (http://openstack.org/) project. All reviews done in Gerrit, published to Github when merged. OpenStack also has the bot which closes GitHub pull requests and redirecting to Gerrit. More on their Gerrit/Github integration here: http://ci.openstack.org/gerrit.html For those interested in doing the same for their own, private projects, there is http://forj.io (full disclaimer, I work on this project). Finally, Gerrit now has an async / TTY based client which works offline (reviews on the go!) with Gertty - https://github.com/stackforge/gertty

Smart!