[Projects] Do we still need a OSGeo software forge? (was Re: Trac/SVN/Gitea upgrade completed, tests welcome)

[Even Rouault]

Hi,

Isn't maintaining a OSGeo Trac/svn/gitea/whatever infrastructure a lost 
battle, waste of energy and volunteer time, strategically dubious / 
sending a inaudible message nowadays? And when I say nowadays, I really 
mean since 10 years at least...

There's no way cool kids will want to contribute to projects using that. 
Plus the fact you need to go over the mantra barrier to create your 
account. It looks really like if we actively wanted to discourage 
contributions, do we?

Which (still active) OSGeo projects are still using that as their 
canonical infa: geos (gitea for git repo & tickets ?), PostGIS (Trac for 
tickets?), ... ? Maybe consider a migration plan to be able to 
completely shut down services at some later point?

At least if OSGeo really wanted to host a software forge, it could host 
a gitlab instance, so the 5% of people who don't use github have at 
least some familiarity with it, but I would even question that (with 
Trac/SVN/gitea, we are targeting the 0.1% outliers). Everybody have sold 
their soul to github and are happily providing food to LLMs. Let's just 
accept it, bend to the powers governing the world, and move on.

Even

~~~~

PS1: interestingly, gitea canonical repository is ... hosted on github 
(https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea). That tells a lot, doesn't it?

PS2: Little tour of other organizations:

- Eclipse Foundation: both github and gitlab 
(https://gitlab.eclipse.org/explore): 
https://blogs.eclipse.org/post/denis-roy/moving-eclipse-projects-github-and-gitlab 
(this post actually makes the same point as me about what the new gen 
expects)

- Apache Foundation: github apparently, at least Apache Arrow uses it 
both for tickets & code

- Freedesktop.org: gitlab

- Gnome: gitlab

- KDE; gitlab

Sure you may find counter-examples to that trend, but it is definitely 
there.


-- 
http://www.spatialys.com
My software is free, but my time generally not.