Move part of macports infrastructure to GitHub

[Landon Fuller]

On Mar 20, 2014, at 8:39 PM, Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> wrote:

> 
> On Mar 20, 2014, at 19:21, Eric Gallager wrote:
> 
>>>> That said, a git/hg mirror on GitHub/ButBucket would definitely be nice.
>>> 
>>> Why would that be nicer than the read-only git mirror that Mac OS Forge already provides here:
>>> 
>>> http://www.macosforge.org/post/git-mirrors/
>>> 
>> Try to avoid thinking of it as "nicer than", but instead think of it as "a nice addition to". The nice thing about distributed systems like git is that it makes it easier to mirror a single mirror to multiple places. A git mirror on GitHub could even be the exact same mirror as the one on MacOSForge is. That is similar to how most of the mirrors on the GitHub-Mirrors account work: https://github.com/mirrors (I think I mentioned that earlier in this thread…)
> 
> Why is a github mirror of the git repository desirable? Why can’t users who want a git version of our repository use the one Mac OS Forge provides? Is it just to help users discover the existence of the repository or what?

In my experience, the alternative is that people republish your code on GitHub anyway, in which case you have a bunch of disconnected mirrors of your code under the same name as your project, none of which is obviously canonical.

If your code is going to wind up republished to GitHub anyway, having a mirror at least allows you to control the branding, point back to the original project, and ensure that it's clear which repositories are user-uploaded mirrors ("forks"), and which is the canonical mirror.

-landonf