Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Jeremy Blosser <jblosser-smgl AT firinn.org>]

On Sep 11, Thomas Orgis [thomas-forum AT orgis.org] wrote:
> Am Sun, 6 Sep 2015 10:55:48 -0500
> schrieb David Kowis <dkowis AT shlrm.org>: 
> > At the very least, this can be a mirror, but I'm proposing that we give
> > it a shot. Since the "grumpy old folks" can continue to operate the
> > exact same way they're operating right now. Just modify the .git/config
> > to point to a different origin.
> 
> About those folks, grumpy and old or not: Isn't there anyone else with
> at least an opinion about this? I'd expect at least one more reply than
> my own. What's the census of people who care about Source Mage
> development?

I have historically been opposed to things that:

1) proposed changing our emphasis on scratching our own itches in favor of
assigning tasks or changing direction to attract other people

2) migration of underlying systems for no clear gain other than "doing
something different"

3) moving our stuff off of things we control *and* have support for without
sufficient cold redundancy available to avoid any major outages

4) using closed products to produce an F/L/OSS distro

With that in mind, I am fine with the idea of us making a gitlab repo our
primary entry point for distribution.

To (1), I don't see the effort here as sufficient to count as distraction,
and the culture of pull requests has been an industry changing shift on the
level of using autotools in your development.

To (2), I think there's a very good chance it would get us some more
visibility among the kind of people we want contributing to this distro,
which is a very real problem right now (that "census of people who care
about Source Mage development").  Historically we've applied to a very
specific niche who loves us when they find us, but don't tend to find us
very readily.  Opening a "storefront" in one of those community places is a
way to get out there without changing anything else we do as a distro.

To (3), it should be trivial to maintain our existing infrastructure as a
direct checkout of the gitlab master and switch back to it whenever needed.
We would likely leave our existing distro struture in place too, so we'd
keep distributing our own codexes and such.

To (4), I wouldn't support this on github, but gitlab provides a truly open
source tool.  They may or may not use that exact release on their community
site, but on the balance I don't see this contrary with our philosophy.

Yes, it would change our auth to do pushes, though I doubt we'd have to use
different keys... you can send the same ssh public key anywhere you want.
I don't see that as an issue.

> If we have to pick one, I'd of course go with the Open Source one. But:
> Gitlab very much looks like Sourceforge in the early times to me. There
> used to be a community version of that software, too.

If they ever stopped being truly open source, I would expect us to treat it
the same way as if they went offline.  We'd go back to full self hosting.

> > resources to do many more things. We've literally got one guy paying for
> > all this out of pocket. (Not to imply we're not thankful for this.)
> 
> The least of our problems is the paying for the server (at least I
> understood Jeremy that way, and if he couldn't affort it anymore, Vlad
> or me could provide servers, too), IMHO. Since our userbase and
> developer base is so small, we also do not need much infrastructure or
> bandwidth.

Except that we can't hope to grow back to even where we were if we're not
stable.  A period of downtime right now like the one that led us to more
professional hosting would likely kill us for good if we were growing at
all.

I am not fond of the bill but yes I'd stop paying it if I couldn't cover
it.  I believe in this distro and even though I don't have a lot of hours
for it anymore I am trying to make up for it with what support I can.

I don't see our infrastructure going away with a move like this, though.
We'd need the same distro size for at least the mirror, we'd still do our
own distro, etc.  Gitlab would just become the primary entry point for
commits and code tracking.

> > If anything, this would make it easier to put more eyes on the things. I
> > cannot guarantee that it will bring more people, but having a trivial
> > way for someone who's interested to come in, make a pull request, see
> > that it's accepted, or commented on, and accepted will probably result
> > in a better experience than what we've got right now. The number of
> > people allowed I'm also pretty sure that this won't affect too many of
> > the things you "ranted" about :)
> 
> Well, my main point to the end was that this decision implies giving
> the hosting duties from people we somewhat know and trust (or people
> who the person we know trusts)

Heh.  I *was* the elected PL for a several years and set up a lot of the
policies we still use, I think the project and I know each other on in our
own right.

> to a totally unknown (arbitrarily large) set of people who have no
> incentive to care about our belongings.

This is why I'd want to insist we have the ability to flip a switch and go
back to our existing setup for commits at any time and also part of why I'd
want us to continue hosting the distribution point ourselves, so we're the
last to touch anything we provide to users and know what we're sending
them.

> I know, it's the new millennium, it's the cloud and everyone trusts
> everyone and cares for each other's wellbeing. I just wanted to have it
> said.

I'm not a big fan of the clouds and some of the things they're forcing on
us, but it's where we are and if we have a user base out there I want a
chance to find them.

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