Re: Savannah vs. Gitlab

[Luboš Doležel]

On 12/07/2015 08:08 PM, Gregory Casamento wrote:
> German,
> 
> I will have to think on it for a bit to be honest.   I got a personal
> email from RMS asking to please NOT move to GitHub and that they are
> considering issuing a statement which says that no GNU project should
> be on GitHub.

Respecting all of hist great work, RMS is an extremist. I wonder how
he's going to function in the world of 3D printers. Is he not going to
buy a toothbrush, to which there is no open source physible?

In my view, due to the decentralized nature of Git, using GitHub does
not restrict anyone's freedom. If RMS thinks otherwise, then FSF should
provide a comparable alternative.

> I believe what's best is to move to a git platform which is free
> software like gogs and maintain the mirror on GitHub.  Savannah is
> just not doing it for us as they STILL have not responded to my
> request to add repositories.   At this point it is just too much.

Having just a mirror on GitHub, yet accepting pull requests is not very
realistic. Git is good for decentralized development, but having
multiple "push targets" brings synchronization problems, because then
you can have potentially diverging histories.

I will go even further and say that when you accept pull requests on
GitHub, you de facto *are* hosted on GitHub (and not just mirrored),
even if you declare that server XYZ is the official host.

Either way, I'll add another alternative:
http://repo.or.cz/ is used by many open source projects. It is hosted by
the Charles University in Prague. It is historically the first public
Git hosting.

But it pales in comparison with GitHub. Not pull requests, no issue
tracking, no code review.

-- 
Luboš Doležel