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martanne
Migrate away from Github
For some reason Github decided to flag my account.
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Git hosting: repo.or.cz/vis.git
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Project communication: mailing list hosted by FreeLists and IRC channel
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Bug tracker: ?
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Continuous integration with:
- Travis (for Linux and macOS bulids, CoverityScan and Codecov integration)
- AppVeyor (for Windows builds)
We could probably use a read-only github project as mirror to keep the build hooks working.
For what it's worth I reported this to Github support yesterday but was told the owner of the account (yourself) would have to report it. Oddly durring this time I could git pull from Github.
Apparently my account was mistaken for a spam bot. I tried to contact them twice through the web form while being logged in with the flagged account, but they seemingly never got my messages. Finally, I sent a mail to [email protected], once they got my inquiry they then promptly cleared the flag.
Also I think their behavior (redirecting all requests to 404 pages) is quite bad. At the very least they should have displayed a message that the account is temporarily suspended due to violations of the terms of service or similar.
Also I think they're behavior (redirecting all requests to 404 pages) is quite bad. At the very least they should have displayed a message that the account is temporarily suspended due to violations of the terms of service or similar.
Agreed it was quite confusing.
despite this incident, i would vote to stay on github. if that's not possible, there are other similar services which provide integrated hosting/bug tracker, eg bitbucket, gitlab, gogs.
I’d "vote" to keep github only as a mirror/hub, we should learn from mistakes and try to not give too much power to a unknow organisation.
At least, having http://repo.or.cz/vis.git up to date reveals to be useful for these kind of situations.
I agree with the idea of keeping a mirror, as redundancy is always a welcome feature. http://repo.or.cz/vis.git and lists are certainly less clunky than the github UI for people who use the web in different manners as well. (Text browsers, etc)
Keeping a mirror on GitHub is a good idea -- better than keeping the main repository on GitHub, actually (especially if you can still take pull requests from GitHub). Among all the obvious reasons to keep a GitHub mirror, it also provides a certain amount of advertising for other approaches to hosting Git repositories online, thus enhancing awareness of ways people can re-decentralize the DVCSes that people have been centralizing on GitHub for years.
Moving away from GitHub unfortunately means losing a lot of potential new contributors. It's become somewhat of an (unfortunate) de facto.
@mqudsi: I think we are more like thinking about using github as a hub (mirror the repos) and try to move other things (issues, wiki, patches, …).
Maybe I’m a bit too activist and so I completely disagree by “it’s that way and let’s keep it” that I’m understanding by using the de facto state of github (which might go down/close/… any time).
In the spirit of suckless tools (which, to me, vis is part of) I'll mention here fossil-scm in case it's strikes others as a potential move away from GitHub:
Git provides file versioning services only, whereas Fossil adds an integrated wiki, ticketing & bug tracking, embedded documentation, technical notes, and a web forum, all within a single nicely-designed skinnable web UI, protected by a fine-grained role-based access control system. These additional capabilities are available for Git as 3rd-party add-ons, but with Fossil they are integrated into the design. One way to describe Fossil is that it is "GitHub-in-a-box."
It's a single executable that can be hosted on anything, written by the same great minds behind SQLite.
It has a git-export feature which can serve for GitHub mirroring etc.
Fossil vs Git Fossil coming from Git
This is not a push, just an idea I think is worth exploring.
I host my own Fossil repositories and use fossgit to mirror them to GitHub. I like the idea, though I could easily imagine there being logistical issues with taking that approach, for vis. At the moment, fossgit is only a one-way mirroring tool. Maybe it'll acquire the ability to sync in the other direction this year.
Fossil is not a suckless solution, it is the suckfull one. In this Blessed Year of Our Lord 2020 it makes absolutely no sense to use any other versioning system than the one which name consists of letters 'g', 'i', and 't' and no other. Which wouldn’t be a problem for non-Github, there are plenty of self-hosting git solutions, but the issues are not repository itself, but issues and pull requests.
For those there are basically two solutions. First, going full suckless way (to quote dwm webpage: “Because dwm is customized through editing its source code, it’s pointless to make binary packages of it. This keeps its userbase small and elitist. No novices asking stupid questions.”) and use the combination of IRC and email list for support and git-request-pull(1) for pull requests. Also, see my report on distributed issue tracking from couple of years ago.
If you want “normal” issue tracker and something like pull requests, than the only viable alternative is gitlab. Yes, it is not perfect, but it is an established alternative, it is mostly free source, and it is possible to export repository (including issue tracker and merge requests). Anything else (and mostly anything else than gitlab.com) is just combination of all disadvantages of gitlab with all isolation of non-mainstream solution.
My suggestion would be either to move to gitlab.com, or just hold your nose and continue using GitHub. However, it is better for the hygiene of the issue tracker, if some decision is made and this ticket is closed one or other way.
You kinda have an attitude problem, @mcepl. You don't even make a good case for your position. I don't know how the vis maintainer feels about it, but I at least think you might try relying more on reason than whatever emotional reaction you're having as a means of making a case for something.
I think GitLab is an acceptable idea, too, though not for any reasons you really made clear -- because you basically never bothered to make any good reasons clear in your comment. If I was a knee-jerk reaction kind of person, you'd have convinced me that GitLab was a bad idea, just because of how you presented your opinions.
There is already a sourcehut mirror: https://git.sr.ht/~martanne/vis In addition, it was mentioned that it would be interesting to integrate sourcehut with github (see 759)
thank you @apotheon. btw fossil's native git integration is pretty decent now and works both ways. there is the occasional new corner case but of course the forums are very responsive and helpful.
@3dc1d3: Yeah, and fossgit uses the built-in functionality; it just makes mirroring easier for some use cases, in part by providing a straightforward way to use configuration to simplify the actual process, which is why I want it for my own purposes.
@RibalGZ: Strange. I had no idea sourcehut existed. It seems to offer a bit less utility than GitLab, apart from the fact there's evidently a Mercurial option as well (which is particularly interesting in an age when even Bitbucket dropped Mercurial support -- despite offering some advantages over Git).
By now there also exists a vis project on sourcehut with an associated mailing list.
I know some community members prefer an email based workflow, so feel free to send patches that way.
OK, sourcehut looks tentatively interesting. I would have to play with it in anger to see how it really works, but somebody finally using git-send-mail(1) cannot be that bad.
Some of the weird plans for payments and so on with sourcehut seem a bit . . . well, weird.
Some of the weird plans for payments and so on with sourcehut seem a bit . . . well, weird.
Well, I prefer when they are honest about their business plan, and they actually have some business plan. And given that it is git send-email-based system, contributors actually do not have to have repositories on the server.