Re: [gentoo-project] Gentoo, GitHub, and the Social Contract

[Andrew Savchenko <bircoph@gentoo.org>]

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On Sat, 14 Feb 2015 21:48:22 +0100 Andreas K. Huettel wrote:
> 
> Hi all, 
> 
> whenever the suggestion comes up to enable contributions to Gentoo via Github 
> pull requests, we also encounter discussion of the Gentoo Social Contract.
> 
> The two points that are seen as conflicting are
> 
> * The software running Github is closed source, proprietary.
> 
> * The Gentoo Social Contract states [1]:
> "Gentoo will never depend upon a piece of software or metadata unless it 
> conforms to the GNU General Public License, the GNU Lesser General Public 
> License, the Creative Commons - Attribution/Share Alike or some other license 
> approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI)."
> 
> We need to resolve this discussion somehow, by formulating a clear policy. 
> Which is why I'm putting it up here for discussion and will ask to add it to 
> the next council meeting agenda. 
> 
> Many arguments have already been made. Feel free to summarize your points 
> again in a reply to this e-mail.

The best way will be to setup our own git platform on Gentoo's own
hosting.

I'm aware of two alternatives: gitlab[1] and gogs[2]. We setup both
at our university for local projects. From our experience gogs is
50x times faster (in terms of CPU and action execution time) than
gitlab. Not so surprising, because gitlab is on ruby interpreters
and gogs is on compiled Go code.

I fully support Gentoo social contract statement that Gentoo should
not depend on non-OSI products, especially on closed proprietary
products despite their wide popularity. Another risk that it may go
away or change its usage policy to an unacceptable state, or become
paid-only and so on at any moment even without warning.

And the last but not the least. Github was or is blocked in some
countries, e.g. it was recently blocked in Russia; this accident
was resolved and Github is available again here, but nobody knows
what will become later. By having separate hosting, ip and url from
other projects Gentoo will minimize legal risks, at least in some
areas.

I don't mind if github will be used unofficially, but any Gentoo
official project should have base functionality available outside
of Github (of course nobody denies to have backups on Github too).

[1] https://about.gitlab.com/
[2] http://gogs.io/

Best regards,
Andrew Savchenko

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