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

[Ben de Groot <yngwin@gentoo.org>]

On 15 February 2015 at 10:23, Mart Raudsepp <leio@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On L, 2015-02-14 at 16:37 -0500, Rich Freeman wrote:
>> On Sat, Feb 14, 2015 at 3:48 PM, Andreas K. Huettel
>> <dilfridge@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> >
>> > 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.
>>
>> I tend to agree with what seems to be the general sentiment.  As long
>> as we still accept patches via bugzilla/etc, then we aren't
>> "depending" on github.
>>
>> FOSS alternatives are to be preferred, but since we don't have those
>> set up, I don't see why we have to live without anything in the
>> meantime.  If somebody wants to host such a thing, I'd encourage them
>> to do so, and work with infra if they'll accept help.
>
> That is a good question.
> I'm sorry if I am the only one to point this out, but:
> We do NOT have even a WEB VIEW of our OFFICIAL overlays to see what is
> going on there without BLINDLY cloning git URIs randomly!
> Why should contributors care ONE BIT about things outside their comfort
> zone of contributions, which is github in many cases these days?
> After 6 months of complete blindness on official overlays, I was
> eventually pointed at an outside cgit which shows what's going on there.
>
> After 2 years of talking, we are still using CVS.
>
> It is not surprising one bit that GitHub is the last hope to people
> hoping to help out, with some folks willing to get their contributions
> to actually MATTER.
> We have failed the community to provide any reasonable free software
> ways to contribute. So semi-open source ways it is.
>
>
> With all the respect to the infra team they have done with their
> existing capabilities, but we need to do better and find better ways to
> achieve what we can with existing resources and fix this completely sad
> state.
>
>
> Mart
>
>

It is unfortunate that things fall through the cracks at infra, and
more and more useful tools are not provided by services under
gentoo.org, but by personal initiatives and hosted on other domains.

For this reason I propose that Sven Wegener, Michał Górny, and Patrick
Lauer be made members of the infra team, because they get things done
that the other infra members don't (for whatever reason, not pointing
fingers here). I'm thinking here about useful tools such as:

- https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo-portage-rsync-mirror
- http://cgit.gentooexperimental.org/
- #gentoo-commits bot
- AutoRepoman

-- 
Cheers,

Ben | yngwin
Gentoo developer