Sure it might creates some hurdles for potential contributors, and cause some discomfort for users
For the user case I believe downloading the archive or even the diff text and applying it is quite straight forward, there isn’t any more steps in that than if it was in a repo, it is another way of pulling the code, I’m pretty used to handle software this way anyway, but most people aren’t, I even doubt people would have pulled the SVN URL if I had released it on SourceForge for example, they would have downloaded the source archive from the website, so I don’t believe that the fact that I don’t upload it to a git/svn service makes it much harder for a user
It is a lot more work to setup a git repo, create an account somewhere, manage ssh keys, setting up configs, making commits, pushing code etc for me
Offers changes back to me is more a me problem, if you create a git repo and send me the patches or URL I can figure the rest out, anyone doing that can still benefit from my diff files as they can be applied to a git repository as well, or they could create two repositories (or branches), one with just my changes and one with theirs mixed in, and get full three way merge as well
For the easily checking what has changed it is quite the same thing, there is an extra step unfortunately
For the relying and trusting me all I can offer is the transparency, I don’t believe many people would notice when a project get forced pushed either, some developers might use the same directory every time to make a pull, and then it would tell them there’s a mismatch, but it is a legit concern nonetheless
I think using git solves that a bit, you would notice if something was forced pushed, as the auto-updating would fail with an error, but applying patches would also fail the same way, but that is of course a manual operation, having it in a SVN repo feels like it would produce the same problem also
SVN is probably as much of obfuscating as these files because git is what everyone uses, so it is more a problem of not using git than not using a (D)VCS I believe
Yea finding it is hard, there are a lot of other benefits with centralized social development platforms, but there was also a time before all that started, I think this community in particular is about not giving up to centralized platforms
If I ever stop the development, die, go rouge, get hacked or anything else I hope the community figures that out on their own and solves the problem then, anyone who wants should download the text diff files and/or the tar.gz files and take a few different checksums of them so they do not change maliciously at least