[geos-devel] Ready to switch from SVN to GIT ?

[Mateusz Loskot]

On 4 April 2017 at 22:54, Regina Obe <lr at pcorp.us> wrote:
> Mat,
>
> Can you state things you like about github over gogs.

We have been discussing it over and over countless of times, with
Sandro and some other OSGeo admins, on IRC especially.
I see no point in debating GitHub vs alternatives, listing and ranking
features, detaioling costs, arguing ethics & politics,
down to manpower and resources required for self-hosting as well as
in-house development of gogs/gitea extras, etc.
Polluting this thread with round N of such debate does not sound interesting.

I just suggested to use GitHub and indicated my judgement is purely
based on features, services, integrations
and overall completeness of software development hosting.
As long as GitHub is alive, online and freely available for OSS, it is
hard to practically and economically justify any alternative.

> I don't know why it bugs me so much about reliance on GitHub, but it does.  Perhaps because I feel it's a free lunch that may not be so free in the future
> And also I don't like that policies may be pushed down on us that we don't necessarily want and that the incentive structure of GitHub is not
> necessarily aligned with our own and may even change based on environmental economics.

If GitHub dies, then you can migrate wherever you desire.
Meanwhile, doomsday prep is still only for the super-rich.

> Then again I understand that maintaining an infrastructure like Gogs requires someone willing to do it or get paid for it, so that's even less of a free lunch but does give us more control over our destiny and how we integrate with other pieces of our infrastructure.

At the moment, do you really need more control?

Fact is, GEOS (OSGeo projects, 21 in 22 [1] projects) has already put
its roots down the GitHub ecosystem
that if anything dies (like Travis CI or AppVeyor), it will require
lots of work to migrate/replicate.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not GitHub advocate. I love/hate GitHub (tm [1]).
At the same time, I admit, I can't comprehend the resistance.
we use 90% of the surrounding services, but we die hard to not to say
the final "Yes, I do" :-)

[1] https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/InfrastructurePreferencesStatusQuo
[2] https://twitter.com/howardbutler/status/842766853088919552


Best regards,
-- 
Mateusz Loskot, http://mateusz.loskot.net