[Python-Dev] PEP 481 - Migrate Some Supporting Repositories to Git and Github

[Ian Cordasco]

On Sun, Nov 30, 2014 at 7:01 AM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
> On Sun, 30 Nov 2014 16:23:08 +1100
> Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Yes, GitHub is proprietary. But all of your actual code is stored in
>> git, which is free, and it's easy to push that to a new host somewhere
>> else, or create your own host. This proposal is for repositories that
>> don't need much in the way of issue trackers etc, so shifting away
>> from GitHub shouldn't demand anything beyond moving the repos
>> themselves.
>
> I hope we're not proposing to move the issue trackers to github,
> otherwise I'm -1 on this PEP.
>
> Regards
>
> Antoine.

So I usually choose not to weigh in on discussions like these but
there seems to be a lot of misdirection in some of these arguments.

To start, I'm generally neutral about this proposal or Nick's proposal
that spurred this one. I've found the most frustrating part of
contributing to anything involving CPython to be the lack of reviewer
time. I have had very small (2-line) patches take months (close to a
year in reality) to get through in spite of periodically pinging the
appropriate people. Moving to git/GitHub will not alleviate this at
all.

To be clear, the main reasoning behind Nick's was being able to submit
changes without ever having to have a local copy of the repository in
question on your machine. Having a complete web workflow for editing
and contributing makes the barrier to entry far lower than switching
VCS or anything else. BitBucket (apparently, although I've never used
this) and GitHub both have this capability and *both* are
free-as-in-beer systems.

No one as I understand it is proposing that we use the per-distro
proprietary interface to these websites.

All data can be removed from GitHub using it's API and can generally
be converted to another platform. The same goes for BitBucket although
it's arguably easier to retrieve issue data from BitBucket than
GitHub. That said, *the issue tracker is not covered by these
proposals* so this is a moot point. Drop it already.

If we're seriously considering moving to git as a DVCS, we should
consider the real free-as-in-freedom alternatives that come very close
to GitHub and can be improved by us (even though they're not written
in Python). One of those is GitLab. We can self-host a GitLab instance
easily or we can rely on gitlab.com. GitLab aims to provide a very
similar user experience to GitHub and it's slowly approaching feature
parity and experience parity. GitLab is also what a lot of people
chose to switch to after the incident Steven mentioned, which I don't
think is something we should dismiss or ignore.

We should refocus the discussion with the following in mind:

- Migrating "data" from GitHub is easy. There are free-as-in-freedom
tools to do it and the only cost is the time it would take to monitor
the process

- GitHub has a toxic company culture that we should be aware of before
moving to it. They have a couple blog posts about attempting to change
it but employees became eerily silent after the incident and have
remained so from what I've personally seen.

- GitHub may be popular but there are popular FOSS solutions that
exist that we can also self-host at something like forge.python.org

- bugs.python.org is not covered by any of these proposals

- The main benefit this proposal (and the proposal to move to
BitBucket) are seeking to achieve is an online editing experience
allowing for *anyone with a browser and an account* to contribute.
This to me is the only reason I would be +1 for either of these
proposals (if we can reach consensus).