[Python-Dev] Move selected documentation repos to PSF BitBucket account?

[Donald Stufft]

> On Nov 21, 2014, at 10:26 AM, Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:
> 
> On Nov 21, 2014, at 10:36 PM, Nick Coghlan wrote:
> 
>> I'd been taking "must be hosted in PSF infrastructure" as a hard
>> requirement, but MAL pointed out earlier this evening that in the age
>> of DVCS's, that requirement may not make sense: if you avoid tightly
>> coupling your automation to a particular DVCS host's infrastructure,
>> then reverting back to self-hosting (if that becomes necessary for
>> some reason) is mostly just a matter of "hg push".
>> 
>> If that "must be self-hosted" constraint is removed, then the obvious
>> candidate for Mercurial hosting that supports online editing + pull
>> requests is the PSF's BitBucket account.
> 
> For the record, I object to moving *official* PSF resources to proprietary,
> closed-source infrastructure that we do not control or have access to[*].
> 
> As nice and friendly as BitBucket or any other code hosting source is today,
> there are many reasons why I think this is a bad idea for *official*
> branches.  We are beholden to their policies and operations, which may not
> align with PSF policies or principles today or in the future.  We will not be
> able to customize the experience for our own needs.  We will not have access
> to the underlying resources should we need them for any purpose.  We cannot
> take action ourselves if some problem occurs, e.g. banning an offensive user.
> 
> You're right that in a world of dvcs, branches can be mirrored anywhere.  For
> that reason, I have no problem allowing developers to use non-PSF controlled
> resources *unofficially* if it makes their work easier and doesn't conflict
> with their own principles.  However, in such cases, I still believe that the
> official, master, blessed repositories remain on PSF controlled
> infrastructure.  Surely that too is possible in the world of dvcs, right?
> 
> Cheers,
> -Barry
> 
> [*] Please note that I am not objecting to our use of lower-level resources
> donated by our generous sponsors.  It's a fine line perhaps, but I have no
> problem with a wiki running on a VM hosted on some donated hardware, since we
> still have full access to the machine, the OS, and the application software.

Personally I care less about proprietary and closed-source and care a lot more
about lock-in. Thus my big problem using Bitbucket for these things is that if
we ever want to *leave* bitbucket it becomes a lot harder because you have a
bunch of links and such pointing at bitbucket instead of a python.org domain.
They do offer a redirect feature but that is dependent on them not taking that
away in the future. (They also offer a CNAME feature but if you use it you lose
the ability to use TLS, which is also a non starter for me). Sadly this also
leaves out my favorite host site of Github :/. Something like Github Enterprise
or Atlassian stash which are able to be migrated away from are better in this
regards.

Ironically we do use a propetiary/closed-source/hosted solution for
https://status.python.org/ but it’s not terribly difficult to migrate away from
that if we ever wanted to.

---
Donald Stufft
PGP: 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA