On Sat, 18 Apr 2015 00:01:29 +0100 Steve McIntyre <st...@einval.com> wrote:
> Ben Finney wrote: > >Paul Tagliamonte <paul...@debian.org> writes: > > > >> So, yes, it's nonfree. Yes, it's controlled by DDs. No, I don't > >> think this should be the Vcs-Git: target. No, I don't think we > >> should endorse GitHub. Yes, we need free tools. Yes, we should > >> contribute to the F/OSS community where upstreams are. > > > >That last part seems to deny the D in DVCS. Why are we under such > >pressure to use one particular centralised service? We are not - however, there is good reason for everyone to not have to work with every git service on the net. Many to Many is worth doing, Every to Every is insane. There has to be somewhere where a number of "small fry" services push mirrors to make their code accessible to the many. We know this already from working with so many upstreams for Debian - some service needs to be a central mirror. Few projects can work with git entirely using patches on a mailing list. What works for one (admittedly large) user base does not work for all - even if it does work for the upstream team, it typically does *not* work for all potential contributors. Now with an extremely large project, that can be an advantage by actually acting as a barrier to entry. For smaller projects, there should be as low a barrier as possible. The simplest way to that goal is to push to github. I don't care what anyone thinks of github - that is the simple fact. If you want to make the barrier to entry of your upstream project as low as possible, you have to include github. It's actually a nice place to be and it's trivial to work with as a project admin too. That's why people use it - it's easy. By all means lock your own little projects into alioth or personal git servers but the reason to go to github is to make it easier for you and the contributors. It makes no sense to ignore that. git won the DVCS argument a long time ago. github won the DVCS UI argument a long time ago - it is clearly the one UI that the largest number of git contributors actually want to use. > Agreed - it's really annoying to see everybody clamour for a > centralised single point of of failure for git hosting. :-( Sorry, Steve, you've missed the point of github being just a hub of mirrored code. It actually does that extremely well, no other service even comes close. Github is just a centralised User Interface, nothing else. It is *the* UI that most people seem to want. It avoids users having to have hundreds of different web accounts and it is a simple hub. It's trivial to push another copy of the source to github and keep the primary source within the corporate access control server. That way, everyone gets a chance to work with you without registering for a corporate web account and upstream get to include github into their access-controlled review workflow. There's no reason for github to be the single remote for anyone with an alioth account - there is also absolutely no reason for anyone to *not* have a github remote for each of their upstream projects as one of a handful of remotes. Why use a DVCS if you are not going to have multiple remotes? github.com/debian is a very useful service and I intend to use it fully. I think a lot more Debian folk and a lot more upstream folk should too. It's a hub, use it as a hub, as one of your remotes. Why not use the biggest, easiest hub to reach the biggest number of potential contributors? What's not to like? -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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