Re: [gentoo-project] Call for agenda items - Council meeting 2021-04-11

[Joonas Niilola]

On 4/9/21 7:03 AM, Alec Warner wrote:
>
> So two things here. One is that we should care about the social
> contract and I think bi-furcating the core parts of gentoo into free
> and non-free is a non-trivial change. If we move people to git syncing
> and github makes some changes, or goes away, or whatever...it's not
> like we have equivalent free setup; our git hosting is literally not
> up to the task of serving those users. I think this is the difference
> between the core offering (e.g. "gentoo") and the non-free software in
> the tree (the add-ons or additional functionality, or whatever.)
> Keeping that logic, we could keep rsync as the default sync method and
> tell people to use github if they want (syncing from github works
> today just fine.) I think that is different from making github the
> default git sync provider. I think this is similar in concept to say,
> having only free software by default; which is a change we made
> somewhat recently, iirc.
>
> This is less true for our CDN stuff, where we could just turn off the
> CDN and be fine[0].
>
>
Can we still offer Github mirror as an alternative in the handbook? And
adding a disclaimer about everything you said above. Or at least provide
a link to wiki page how to switch into git-syncing, somewhere in the
"Finalizing" section or "Portage introduction" perhaps?

If Github decides to "go away" quite many distributions will be far more
screwed, as some host their whole infrastructure there. At least Gentoo
has a plan B. And/If Github somehow just targets Gentoo removing our
repos, I'm sure it'll hit enough headlines to reach the users, and
they'll understand.

In the end, we're doing this for our users. I'm sure many people will
find the switch to git-syncing a treat, so the alternative should be
advertised more. (/ be more visible)

-- juippis