Re: [gentoo-project] Call for Agenda Items -- Council Meeting 2015-10-11

[hasufell <hasufell@gentoo.org>]

On 10/10/2015 08:56 PM, Andrew Savchenko wrote:
> On Fri, 9 Oct 2015 14:15:15 +0200 hasufell wrote:
>> On 10/09/2015 01:56 PM, Anthony G. Basile wrote:
>>> Well let's think about this.  If github went away, or we needed to part
>>> ways with github, what we would we want to keep from their site?
>>
>> It is more likely that our infra servers go down or break than github.
>> From a reliability standpoint, our infra servers clearly lose.
> 
> This is not a question of infrastructure high availability, this is
> a question of the data long-term availability. GitHub is outside of
> our control. If it perishes, we are in trouble, big trouble if we
> stored important data and had important workflow via GitHub only.
> 
> And unfortunately the words above are not sheer speculation.
> 
> 1) GitHub _was already blocked_ in several countries [1]. We are an
> international community, thus we can't rely on such resource.
> 

We do not rely on it as you make it sound. Most big projects have
multiple contribution channels and because they do have more than one,
the data is even more safe. Not the other way around.

Since most of github related actions are recorded via mails, we won't
even have to care if it gets shut down. We have the data. And we still
have the git repository. We just lost one contribution platform which
was _never_ mandatory.

And as long as it is not mandatory, all your fears are completely misguided.

The only problem that arises is the desync of data. Mgorny was trying to
fix it, until you came up (sorry if that sounds offensive, but that's
what I got from the flow of the discussion).

> 2) Since GitHub is not completely open, it has a rist of following
> SourceForge fate. Before GitHub appeared SourceForge was probably
> the most popular development platform, at least 8-10 years ago.
> They were good guys. Later their owner changed, their policy
> changed, with known consequences: now SourceForge is known for its
> project hijacking [2] and adware. The worst result is that
> SourceForge is damaged good Free Software projects, e.g. GIMP [3]
> and now blocked by most anti-ads software [4,5]. 
> 
> And now GitHub are good guys. But for how long?
> I want to ensure long-time project stability of Gentoo, that's why
> I can't accept the violation of the Gentoo Social contract, which
> was made to protect the project from dangers alike this one. That's
> why we must have our own infrastructure.
> 

Again: we already have our own infrastructure. Github is optional.

> Please note, nobody says: you can use GitHub only overy my dead
> body. As can be seen from this discussion, there is a solution: all
> GitHub data must be mirrored on our infrastructure in a usable and
> searchable way, so that:
> 1) we will ensure long-time availability of all development data;
> 2) no single developer will be force to use GitHub to "politely
> review pull requests" or whatever.
> 

Yes, the proposed solution seems to have gone down in all that spam of
the previous posts. This ML should really be moderated.

However, instead of repeating your fears over and over again you could
just connect with the involved people and infra to help moving forward
that solution. From the way you argue about this, I suspect you have a
lot of energy and time to help.

In addition... who is going to mirror all Freenode data to our own
infrastructure? Are you going to help with that too? If not, then I
suggest you slow down a little bit and don't offend all the gentoo
projects that are running overlays on github since years in order to be
more open to contributions.

You didn't really make it sound like you want to improve something, so
that's probably why people got pissed off. Are you going to offer that
help now?