Goodbye Mac OS Forge, hello GitHub

[Jake Petroules]

Hey Ryan,

This is AWESOME news! Been hoping to hear this for a while now, and it will definitely make my qbs port maintainership a bit easier. :D

Looking forward to to the move and a big welcome to the next generation of MacPorts!

> On Aug 19, 2016, at 5:18 PM, Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> wrote:
> 
> I'm pleased to announce that MacPorts will be moving its source code to
> GitHub. The exact date for the move has not yet been set; this message is
> just to let you know that these changes are coming soon.
> 
> Since 2006, Apple has hosted MacPorts on its Mac OS Forge service. In the
> decade since Mac OS Forge was created, collaborative software development
> platforms like GitHub and BitBucket have become very popular and successful,
> and when I was hired as Mac OS Forge sysadmin last year, part of my job was
> to evaluate whether such services could be a suitable replacement for those
> offered by Mac OS Forge. We determined that the answer was yes, and that
> GitHub was the best choice, due to its overwhelming popularity. Other Mac OS
> Forge projects including XQuartz, CUPS and CalendarServer are already in the
> process of moving to GitHub, and the time has now come for MacPorts to
> likewise bid a fond farewell to Mac OS Forge and move on.
> 
> The other MacPorts managers and I, and some other members of the community,
> have discussed this change at length. Over the years, several developers
> have asked why we're not on GitHub. The perception is that "everybody" is on
> GitHub, and some developers don't take your project seriously if it's not on
> GitHub. Part of our answer to such questions has been that it would be a
> pain to move, and that what we had at Mac OS Forge was good enough. But now
> that we have to leave Mac OS Forge anyway, it makes sense to convert to git
> and take the opportunity to do some much needed and overdue restructuring
> and splitting of our repository, and to move to GitHub to make use of their
> great collaboration features such as pull requests which some of our
> contributors have been wishing for. Hopefully, in addition to the other
> benefits, moving to GitHub will help us attract and keep new developer
> talent.
> 
> In a January survey on this list, most developers indicated a preference for
> git, or that they were happy with the Subversion client. GitHub accommodates
> both. More on that in a separate mail to follow.
> 
> We've given much thought to the way we use our Trac ticket system, and after
> extensive discussion on how we might be able to use GitHub Issues, and even
> performing a trial conversion of our tickets, we came to the realization
> that moving to GitHub Issues would be a step back for us. (GitHub Issues
> doesn't have custom fields, which we use to indicate the name of the port(s)
> affected by the ticket, and the available workarounds are unsatisfactory.
> And the original author of the ticket or comment cannot be preserved when
> importing to GitHub Issues. In short, converting to GitHub Issues would be
> lossy.) We also considered converting to Jira or BugZilla, but in the end,
> we decided that staying with Trac is the best and least disruptive choice
> for now. We will migrate the data from our Trac installation to a new
> server, taking the opportunity to upgrade to the latest version of Trac and
> make some other improvements.
> 
> We've already completed several steps of this transition. Earlier in the
> year, we announced that we started using MaxCDN in front of our primary file
> server to distribute our files faster. Earlier this month, we announced the
> new home for our primary file server at the Friedrich-Alexander University.
> And our new buildbot automated build system announced earlier this month is
> being hosted by me on my hardware, outside of Apple, and will just need
> minor changes to monitor GitHub instead of Subversion.
> 
> MacPorts domain names were already owned by the project, and have been moved
> to NameCheap. DNS will move from Apple to NameCheap. @macports.org email
> forwarding will move to a new server. The www.macports.org and
> guide.macports.org web sites will move to a new server while retaining the
> same functionality for now. Apple will continue to host our mailing lists.
> 
> This transition should be mostly transparent to users. A separate email will
> be sent to the announcement and users lists closer to the time of the move
> detailing what steps users might need to take.
> 
> On behalf of portmgr, thanks to Clemens Lang for writing the MacPorts
> Subversion to git conversion rules we're going to use, and to Larry
> Velázquez for registering the "macports" username on GitHub years ago in
> anticipation of this day. Thanks again to our former Mac OS Forge sysadmins
> Keith Dart, Henry Groen, Shreeraj Karulkar, and Bill Siegrist for keeping
> everything running all these years. And our most appreciative and humble
> thanks to Apple for supporting open source software by allowing its
> developers to create the initial version of MacPorts and release it as open
> source software, and by providing hardware and network bandwidth to host it.
> We are very grateful.
> 
> I'm sure you'll have questions. More information will follow. Thank you all
> for bearing with us during this transition.
> 
> _______________________________________________
> macports-dev mailing list
> macports-dev at lists.macosforge.org
> https://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-dev

-- 
Jake Petroules - jake.petroules at petroules.com

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