@Gilles I wouldn't have any problem taking questions like those, but not those two questions. The first problem is that both are asking for resources instead of asking a question that would be answered by a combination of resources and specific quotes.

The open source politics question is way too broad and asks too many questions. Only a few of those questions might be OK on Programmers. I would take the question about who does the work and the distribution of the networks, but probably not the others.

The activity level question I would reject since there's no problem there. It's just a request for information, something more suitable to a search engine rather than asking a room full of people.

As far as justifying these "sociology of open source projects" under our FAQ, I'd say it falls under software engineering. After all, I've read research papers studying the effects of networks in software development (an example, with regards to quality) in IEEE and ACM Software Engineering publications.

Anyone alive?

@Mr.Anubis Unless the robot apocalypse has already begun, then yes.

@Dynamic I'm new to svn thing, can you help me choosing good mercurial client?

I use Tortoise Hg

It comes with the Mercurial download: mercurial.selenic.com

@Dynamic The op seems uncomfortable with mercurial hg

and I'm newbie 0o

how 'd I handle that ?

@Mr.Anubis Joel Spolsky, co-founder of Stack Exchange, created this awesome tutorial for beginners: hginit.com

That's how I learned.

There are also free webinars from Fog Creek for beginners to Mercurial: fogcreek.com/kiln/training/#training

@Dynamic I tried to read it but He assumed one knows basic about svn I guess

@Mr.Anubis No, he says to skip the first "chapter" if you've never used svn.

hmmm, ok, I'll reading it again , thanks for help :)

@Mr.Anubis Any time :-)

@Dynamic btw what is branch in svn?