Re: we now have "lilypond" organization on GitHub

[David Kastrup]

Joseph Rushton Wakeling <address@hidden> writes:

> On 22/09/13 17:53, David Kastrup wrote:
>> Yup.  So we are talking about creating untested patches here that
>> eventually travel into the usual testing pipeline we use.
>
> The main GitHub-hosted project that I'm involved with has auto-testing
> set up for pull requests, that's obviously integrated to some degree
> with GitHub itself (as the pull requests display info about test
> pass/failures).
>
> I don't know how much work might be involved or what tools would be
> needed, but there's certainly no problem in principle with using
> GitHub and having rigorous testing of all submitted code.  In fact it
> should be easier for contributors to use than Rietveld because it
> entirely avoids the need for the custom tools that Lilypond currently
> uses for Riedveld submission.
>
> The major problems that I can see with GitHub are a mix of GNU (it's a
> non-free online tool) and the potential for lockin (GitHub is very
> obviously positioning itself to be _the_ online collaboration space
> and is developing a whole load of functionality that is only available
> via its web service and not offline).

GitHub's usage conditions are so aggressively proprietary and
disenfranchising that it's not suitable for our regular processes.  They
reserve the right of shutting accounts and projects down if they don't
like their bandwidth usage or for any other reason.  They prohibit
mimicking the "look and feel" of the GitHub web interfaces, and their
software is proprietary.

So they are pretty unfit for a GNU project like LilyPond aligning itself
with them.  That does not mean that individual contributors might not
use GitHub for their personal workflows, but I would consider it highly
inappropriate to move parts of the project-wide infrastructure there.

So I think the options we might be thinking about is seeing whether
Savannah could host Gerrit (which covers just the review part of our
processes as far as I could tell) and/or something like Gitorious which
would cover more.

Gitorious offers hosting, but it seems like that would mainly be
interesting for getting a good first impression.  If that's an option,
it would likely be much preferable to run their software (it's AGPL) off
Savannah.

At any rate, I think the first thing we would likely want to experiment
with would just be Gerrit.

-- 
David Kastrup