Re: Forge Software Evaluation by FSF

[Jonas Hahnfeld]

Am Dienstag, den 25.02.2020, 23:38 +0100 schrieb David Kastrup:
> Jonas Hahnfeld <
> address@hidden
> > writes:
> 
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > I was meaning to write on the next steps of switching to new tooling
> > when I came across this:
> > https://lwn.net/Articles/813254/rss
> > 
> > https://www.fsf.org/blogs/sysadmin/coming-soon-a-new-site-for-fully-free-collaboration
> > 
> > https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Fsf_2019_forge_evaluation
> > 
> > 
> > In particular the last page claims with respect to GitLab:
> > "GNU ethical repo criteria: gitlab.com listed as C, but has been
> > operating at an F and will be reclassified soon because it sometimes
> > requires users to run nonfree Google ReCAPTCHA code they have been very
> > slowly working on moving away from for almost 2 years now [...]"
> > 
> > What do people think about this? Is that serious enough to stop
> > considering GitLab?
> > 
> > Note that Gerrit is not on the list (probably because it's not a
> > complete forge software, ie no issues?), so I can't comment on how it
> > compares with respect to freedom.
> > 
> > Let me see if I can get more information on when they plan to bring the
> > hosting platform online.
> 
> We don't have a whole lot of viable alternatives at the moment.  And we
> have the problem that LilyPond is pretty large (even discounting the CI
> thing) for being a well-beloved free-tier customer.
> 
> Being supported by the FSF certainly would solve some worries (not
> likely CI) but they are not exactly bristling in manpower either.
> 
> So it would be interesting in several respects what the FSF is planning
> to do and support, and how viable for a big project what they are
> thinking about could be.
> 
> The FSF has in recent months been hit heavily by Richard Stallman
> stepping back as president of the FSF and the FSF having to more
> formally redefine their manner of providing support for the GNU project.
> That may have affected the speed with which they are progressing with
> that project.
> 
> At any rate, there is nothing wrong with trying to get more information
> for arriving at a decision, so it would be great for you to figure out
> what the current plans regarding project hosting are.

So I tried, but not very successfully: There have been some posts to
repo-criteria-discuss in January and last October, but not in between.
The mentioned list libreplanet-dev is empty, except for one reaction to
the blog post. Same holds for savannah-hackers-public. Unless I missed
a very obvious place, I'm not sure where the discussions are taking
place...

I also had a look at the evaluated software:
 * For Pagure, there exists an importer script from GitHub and the now
shut down fedorahosted.org. However I can't even get a small project of
mine migrated and there's close to no documentation on this interface.
Looking into the source code hasn't helped either.
 * Gitea also recently got a migration interface. Again only for
GitHub, and it didn't work either when I tried. To make things even
worse, the interface is internal only so you need to write the
migration logic in Go, wait for a release and deploy it to the server.
 * I found no migration of issues to SourceHut, it's probably too new.

All three of them also have APIs that allow to create issues / tickets
/ whatever they name it. However you can't supply the ids, they are
autogenerated.
Long story short: We would not be able to migrate our existing issues
from SF and retain their ids. I consider this a blocker, and I don't
have any hint to believe that this possibility will suddenly appear.

Jonas

signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part