Move part of macports infrastructure to GitHub

[Landon Fuller]

On Mar 16, 2014, at 11:40 PM, Joshua Root <jmr at macports.org> wrote:

> However I would also agree with what Landon said here:
> <https://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-dev/2013-September/024252.html>

I’m glad I read the full thread, as otherwise I might have reiterated this point without realizing I’d already made it :-)

That said —

The better I understand git, the less I like it, but the fact is that the industry has shifted and git is the leader for now. I’d certainly support a move to git, especially if we had the time and server-side control necessary to disable dangerous, data-destroying features such as permanent deletion of branches+tags and forced pushes, and thus could be assured that repository history would remain correct and internally consistent until the next SCM emerges.

However, I still think it’s a backwards step to abandon self-hosted control of critical project infrastructure, and I don’t think there’s a compelling technical or administrative argument for Github that outweighs this. I’ve not seen *better* or more *correct* contributions by using Github on projects; rather, it seems to lower the bar (and even that is arguable) on the least important part of the process — submitting the patch.

I also have some ethical qualms about contributing to the furtherance of what amounts to Github’s social network lock-in through network effects. They’re a commercial organization, and I don’t think an open source monoculture defined and driven by GitHub's business goals and ideals of how people should manage projects is to open source's benefit.

Lastly, I question the wisdom of tying a project that has already lived for 12 years to a commercial “SaaS” offering. Recently, I had to move some small projects off of Google Code — because Google had deprecated and removed their data APIs, I had to actually use a screen scraper to (lossily) export my Google Code issues.

If you’d told me 8 years ago that Google would pull the data APIs and make it difficult to leave, I wouldn’t have believed it.

-landonf
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