Re: Mirroring GNOME on github

["Jasper St. Pierre" <jstpierre mecheye net>]

On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 12:09 PM, John Stowers
<john stowers lists gmail com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I spoke about this with a few people at GUADEC, but I would like to
> continue the discussion here.
>
> Can we please mirror the GNOME repositories on github.org
> (https://github.com/GNOME)?
>
> Advantages
> * Many many people already have forks of GNOME components there, if
> GNOME was the parent of these clones then we could easily the
> differences
> * Github has a working code search
> * Nice web UI including visual image diffs, branch diff browser,
> commit browser, etc
> * Allows maintainers see who is working on their project via
> notification of forks and watchers
> * Code search is approximately ∞ than google code search (RIP)
> * In my experience cloning from github is faster than cloning from gnome.org
> * Improved visibility, perception of openness, other marketing intangibles.
>
> Disadvantages
> * Maintainers might see this is mandating them change their workflow.
> I emphasize that github should be only a mirror, interaction and
> merging should occur first on git.gnome.org

This is a killer. There would just be forks of random GitHub
repositories with patches, and people submitting pull requests, that
are as effective as /dev/null. Slashdot writes that we're mirroring on
GNOME, and the designers are the cabal again.

if we want to mirror on GitHub, we need to have an active presence
there. I don't know what that would mean.

I'd really like if it we would switch to GitHub wholesale; it would be
great for PR and everything. But it won't happen, because:

> * Github UI is not FOSS

And that's that. To me, having the entirety of GitHub contributing to
GNOME would be so much more than a sacrifice of freedom. But that's
not my decision to make.

> * Work required to keep mirror up to date
>
> Regarding the last point, Alberto Ruiz already has some scripts that
> are manually run to update the mirror. A simple approach would be to
> put these on the gnome servers and run them in the post commit hook.
> However, Github already maintains mirrors for others
> (https://github.com/mirrors). I would not be surprised if they could
> do a similar thing for us if we ask.
>
> Regards,
>
> John
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-- 
  Jasper