Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

sm-discuss - Re: [SM-Discuss] Github as primary source repository for SourceMage?

sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Public SourceMage Discussion List

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Jeremy Blosser <jblosser-smgl AT firinn.org>
  • To: sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Discuss] Github as primary source repository for SourceMage?
  • Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2014 11:52:05 -0500

On Sep 17, David Kowis [dkowis AT shlrm.org] wrote:
> It has been brought up that Github isn't OSS, and that we could be
> locked into a vendor. My opinion in the matter is that Github is just
> fluff on top of Git that makes it easy to view things and easier to
> perform some actions.

Count me among the people with the it's-not-OSS concerns, but it's got very
little to do with fear we'd be locked in somehow and a lot more to do with
what culture we are contributing to. I have a real concern we fought off
the lock-in culture of MS and others only to see a new generation take all
the great OSS tools and use them to create another kind of lock-in culture.
Whether there's a risk to our content or not, it's more about participating
in that. As much as I'm not a "GNU/Linux" > "Linux" person, one thing I've
always appreciated about SMGL is that we've tended to be on the zealot's
side of the license debates, because someone needs to be.

Hearing "github is the go-to place for OSS software" doesn't strike me as a
positive, it strikes me as something that should concern people. The cloud
is so far not a particularly open thing.

Also count me among the ones asking what problem we'd be solving. I've
never understood the periodic push to replace our web infrastructure with
something else when we don't have the content or the people producing the
content. It feels like doing something to seem like activity is happening.
We still don't seem back to the level of online documentation we had when I
started using SMGL back when it was the oldwiki, pre-Drupal, because that
content never had enough people migrating it or updating as years went by.

It's been said github would be easier to do maintenance tasks on and while
that may be true I'm not aware it's hard to do them how we have it now. If
there are real issues showing up with server speed and the like somehow, as
I said in the other mail we could first try moving to a better datacenter,
which I've only not done yet because there didn't seem to be interest or
concerns out there.

Still, obviously these days my main contributions are the funding of the
existing setup and as a still-enthusiastic user and sometimes contributor
who keeps trying to find time to do more again. If people think this will
truly help the distro move forward, I'm in no place to try to stand in the
way of it.



Attachment: pgpOpQELeJFAI.pgp
Description: PGP signature




Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page