Re: we now have "lilypond" organization on GitHub

[David Kastrup]

Joseph Rushton Wakeling <address@hidden> writes:

> On 23/09/13 14:15, David Kastrup wrote:
>> GitHub's usage conditions are so aggressively proprietary and
>> disenfranchising that it's not suitable for our regular processes.  They
>> reserve the right of shutting accounts and projects down if they don't
>> like their bandwidth usage or for any other reason.  They prohibit
>> mimicking the "look and feel" of the GitHub web interfaces, and their
>> software is proprietary.
>>
>> So they are pretty unfit for a GNU project like LilyPond aligning itself
>> with them.  That does not mean that individual contributors might not
>> use GitHub for their personal workflows, but I would consider it highly
>> inappropriate to move parts of the project-wide infrastructure there.
>
> Yes, I completely agree with that.  They are very aggressively trying
> to colonize the "collaboration space" online, and it's very much at
> odds with any project concerned with freedom.
>
> However, it's worth looking into the technical side of how GitHub
> manages things like automated testing.  The user experience of using
> GitHub to manage submission, review and automated testing of pull
> requests is extremely nice.  If you don't have personal experience of
> that, it's worth looking into, just in order to appreciate what people
> are looking for.

Well, the usage conditions prohibit mimicking them, but then I have my
doubts that this will stand before a court.  So the worst that can
happen realistically is that they kick you out.  Which they can for any
reason at all anyway.

>> So I think the options we might be thinking about is seeing whether
>> Savannah could host Gerrit (which covers just the review part of our
>> processes as far as I could tell) and/or something like Gitorious
>> which would cover more.
>>
>> Gitorious offers hosting, but it seems like that would mainly be
>> interesting for getting a good first impression.  If that's an
>> option, it would likely be much preferable to run their software
>> (it's AGPL) off Savannah.
>
> Of course, as a GNU project you could always switch your VCS to Bazaar
> and use Launchpad.  Yes, I am joking. :-)

I think GNU is no longer actively promoting Bazaar since Canonical's
influence in the project does not really seem to go in a direction
encouraging community participation.

IIRC, the Emacs ELPA is hosted using Git, and Emacs itself is not far
from considering to move.

> More seriously -- can I humbly suggest that as a first port of call
> it's better to let someone else deal with the hosting and maintenance
> of whatever code-hosting/pull management solution you choose, and only
> roll your own if it turns out to be genuinely necessary?

The git-cl work was genuinely necessary for making it tolerable for
command-line people to deal with the web interfaces of Google Code
chosen for hosting and maintenance of the issue tracker, as far as
I understand.

You go mad if you have to do serious amounts of stuff in the "as
intended" way without it.

> E.g. git-cl:
> http://www.lilypond.org/doc/v2.17/Documentation/contributor/commits-and-patches#uploading-a-patch-for-review
>
> ... which in my experience is an annoying and cumbersome workaround
> for the code submission and code testing services either not working
> well together or not being set up properly.

So how do you set up Google Code properly?  It's always easy to blame
people for the things they had to do in order to work with the limited
options available in the past.

>> At any rate, I think the first thing we would likely want to experiment
>> with would just be Gerrit.
>
> I think before making any experiments or decisions, it's best to make
> sure that the following things are well known:
>
>      (i) What Savannah offers _out of the box_ in terms of code hosting, easy
>          web interface for submission, management & review of pull requests,
>          hooks into issue tracking services (Google Code?) and hooks into
>          automated testing services.

Heh.  Are you sure you have an accurate view of what Savannah is and
does?

> If the pros and cons of all of that are written up so that everyone
> can review it, then everyone is in a much better position to make a
> decision.

The main obstacle is not making decisions but rather putting in the work
required to follow through with them.

-- 
David Kastrup