Re: [GCD] Migrating repositories, issues, and patches to Codeberg

[Tomas Volf]

Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

> [..]
>
> Anyway, the proposal is about migrating repositories, issues, and
> patches to Codeberg.  You’ll find the rationale, plan, and open issues
> in the attached draft.  I already found two “sponsors” for the proposal
> (meaning they agree with the general direction and are willing to
> participate in discussions) but if anyone else would like to sponsor it,
> I’m happy to add them.
>
> Feedback welcome!

My personal point of view here is that I would somewhat miss the
integration to Emacs the current tooling has.  I like Gnus and I like
debbugs.el.  I noticed that you mentioned fj.el, but this sentence from
README

> If you find you are still being asked for the repo when calling a
> command from inside a repo with a Forgejo remote, check to make sure
> the local root directory matches the name of the Forgejo repo!

sound like using it from git worktree will be somewhat annoying.  The
README recommend to just "set fj-token", I *hope* it can be integrated
with (auth)Top somehow.  So I definitely have some research to do here.

From more ideological point of view, I think it is a strict downgrade
regarding the entry barrier.  The very first thing new contributor needs
to do before contributing to GNU Guix is to read Terms of Service
document of a third party and agree to it.

I took the time to read it, and there are few points I have an issue
with:

§ 2 (1) 3. looks pretty annoying for occasional contributors.

§ 2 (1) 4. forces us to rewrite repository history in case of
compromise, instead of just reverting the malicious commits.  I do not
know what the Guix's current policy is for such a case, but it is worth
to keep in mind that we would no longer have a say in the matter.

§ 2 (4) is annoying for people not familiar with German law (which
includes me).  Savannah is in the US, where the rules (possibly aside
the copyright laws) are bit less strict (at least that is my
impression).

§ 2 (5), especially the "its reputation" part, can easily lead to
loosing Codeberg account, and therefore ability to contribute to Guix,
over, for example, Mastodon toot complaining that Codeberg it down
again.  After all, that could very well be considered "Action intended
to damage the [Codeberg's] reputation".

§ 3 (4) is pretty WTF.  They could at least send an email.  I plan to
keep working from the Emacs, so I am pretty sure I will not check the
dashboard for announcement messages regarding ToS changes every three
months.

§ 4 (4) is the typical "we can nuke your account at any time for any
reason".  Nice.

And the "You must make sure that we have a way to contact you by keeping
the email address of your account up-to-date." is just a final middle
finger, because while I *have* to keep mail address up to date, they
cannot be bothered to use it to send me information that ToS did change.

I am not sure I agree to these (definitely not to all of them), so I
would probably be precluded from further contributions (since I would
need an account on Codeberg, which I cannot get without agreeing to the
ToS).

Also, there is a pretty nasty failure state when they do change the ToS,
and none of the committers would agree to the change.  At that point
they (per the ToS) have to close their accounts and the whole repository
would be just stuck in the void with no way to migrate it away.  I agree
this is pretty unlikely though.

Any opinions here?  All of this would be solved by our own instance,
however I fully understand your point about the admin team being busy
enough already.

Have a nice day,
Tomas

-- 
There are only two hard things in Computer Science:
cache invalidation, naming things and off-by-one errors.

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