Gentoo Archives: gentoo-project

From: "Michał Górny" <mgorny@g.o>
To: Andrew Savchenko <bircoph@g.o>
Cc: gentoo-project@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-project] Gentoo, GitHub, and the Social Contract
Date: Sun, 15 Feb 2015 15:22:08
Message-Id: 20150215162158.1ed948b3@pomiot.lan
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-project] Gentoo, GitHub, and the Social Contract by Andrew Savchenko
1 Dnia 2015-02-15, o godz. 18:05:01
2 Andrew Savchenko <bircoph@g.o> napisał(a):
3
4 > On Sun, 15 Feb 2015 14:50:27 +0100 Michał Górny wrote:
5 > > Dnia 2015-02-15, o godz. 15:39:58
6 > > Andrew Savchenko <bircoph@g.o> napisał(a):
7 > > > On Sun, 15 Feb 2015 10:55:41 +0100 Alexey Lapitsky wrote:
8 > [...]
9 > > > Is Gentoo willing to say "no" to the software freedom and its own
10 > > > social obligations in order to make contributions easier in the
11 > > > simplest way possible?
12 > >
13 > > Please explain me, how *exactly* does allowing contributions via
14 > > proprietary platform hurt free software?
15 >
16 > If this platform will become a de-facto common way to made
17 > contributions (and this may happen taking into account github's
18 > popularity), then platform unavailability or policy changes may
19 > hurt the whole development process.
20
21 Sure. So what's the alternative? Not getting the contributions
22 in the first place?
23
24 If users are willing enough to contribute without GitHub, then GitHub
25 availability doesn't really impact that. If it becomes unavailable,
26 the contributions may require some more effort for them but they'll do
27 it.
28
29 Of course, some users will decide it's no longer worth the extra effort
30 to contribute if GH becomes unavailable. But then, those people
31 wouldn't contribute if we didn't ever use GitHub either. So either way,
32 we lose.
33
34 And yes, we are already getting contributions via GH we wouldn't get
35 other way. Because it's low effort enough for people to submit trivial
36 fixes. The alternative of opening bugs and attaching patches,
37 and the package maintainers ignoring them is not really welcoming.
38
39 That said, I'm willing to accept contributions via any media as long
40 as it's remotely sane on my end. Feel free to open a mailing list to
41 accept patches/pull requests. Or any other patch review framework
42 as long as it's relatively sane and works.
43
44 Just don't require contributors to do too much. Yes, git can do plain
45 pull requests but you have to have somewhere to pull from first. Not
46 every user has a private git hosting. Sure, they could ask you to pull
47 from github... but what's the difference then?
48
49 The risk of being unable to using something in the future should not
50 prohibit people from using its benefits right now.
51
52 > Please forgive me for repeating myself once more, but I was
53 > directly asked "how", so... Github is not just a git server, this
54 > is a platform with numerous instruments and auxiliary data. In case
55 > of any negative change all these data (issues, code reviews and so
56 > on) will be lost. And there is no clean way to migrate these data
57 > to another facilities. Thus we will have a classic web-based
58 > lock-in with all lock-in driven consequences.
59
60 That's a problem with every solution. If you migrate to another one,
61 you may have trouble moving the data. If the hard drive fails, you lose
62 the data since last backup. And finally, if you get too much data, you
63 lose it anyway because nobody cares to dig up what you're looking for.
64
65 --
66 Best regards,
67 Michał Górny