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

[Regina Obe]

> 
> 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...
>
We don't just manage osgeo projects here, but also all our servers and some other things.
So no I wouldn't say it's a lost cause, cause a lot of the stuff we manage in gitea and trac, I wouldn't want on github.
Sure we have private repos on github for now.
 
> 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?
> 
PostGIS has mirrors on github and gitlab so I don't think we are missing much on cool kid traffic.


> 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?
> 
Hello - GEOS is completely on github now, you guys won that battle, or have you forgotten?
I still don't care to entertain tickets on github.  Even despite the mantra thing, I still feel we have way too many tickets on PostGIS 😊
I do wonder though if we should move out of trac as that does seem to cause us the most headache when we upgrade.

> 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). 

Gitlab takes way more effort to maintain than gitea. Gitea is a simple executable and a PostgreSQL backend db.  Nothing simpler than that
and it does the job fine and well github (an open source utopia that isn't open source, sounds like an oxymoron to me). 
Github is really just free CI horsepower and perhaps a place to get random patches, and that's great we use it for those things.

> 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.
> 
If I was interested in being an EVERYBODY, I would have stuck with SQL Server, gone the ESRI Arc whatever route like everyone else around me
and never stepped on OSGeo sand.

You may thing this is a lost cause, but I'd rather battle a lost cause, than sell my soul like everybody.

Thanks,
Regina