[kde-community] Official KDE mirror on github

[Jos van den Oever]

On Monday 17 August 2015 07:46:44 Martin Graesslin wrote:
> Hi community,
> 
> over the last months I observed the following:
> * people not finding our git repositories

Searching on ixquick:
'calligra git' https://community.kde.org/Calligra/Git
'kde git' https://community.kde.org/Sysadmin/GitKdeOrgManual
'kwin git' https://github.com/faho/kwin-tiling
'plasma git' https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Active/Development

Searching on Google:
'calligra git' https://community.kde.org/Calligra/Building/2
'kde git' https://techbase.kde.org/Development/Git
'kwin git' http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2014/04/kwin-moved-to-an-own-repository/
'plasma git' -> https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/plasma-desktop-git/

On google the highest link to github was in position 4. Not too bad.

There was no link to https://projects.kde.org/ or https://quickgit.kde.org/

What part of the KDE infrastructures can be fixed to make the repositories 
easier to find?

> * people being surprised that our code is not on github

This is good moment to educate them on the ideals of KDE.

> * some projects starting to use github in addition to our own infrastructure

We have a manifesto that disallows this.

> Whether we like it or not, github has become a place to look for free
> software nowadays and if you are not on github your software just doesn't
> exist. Given that we can say KDE doesn't produce source code because we are
> not on github.

And Android has become the only phone OS. Windows the only PC os. Microsoft 
Office is the only office suite. Google is the only search engine. Chrome is the 
only browser. Facebook is the only way for communicating with other humans 
(even if they are in view).

> Other projects have an official mirror (see e.g. [1]) which solves the three
> points I have listed above.
> 
> I suggest that we:
> * introduce an official mirror for all KDE repositories on github
> * replace all existing (non-official) clones
> * disallow pull-requests on github to not replace our development model by a
> proprietary platform.
> 
> Comments?

GitHub might be over the top of its popularity. If KDE moves to GitHub, we 
will make our hits in search engines point to GitHub more often.
I've started using GitLab for repositories that I have to collaborate on with 
non-KDE people. The reason for this is that GitLab allows moving to servers 
that are under my control. There are other GitHub alternative coming up such 
as Gogs.

If KDE mirrors to GitHub but not to the alternatives, KDE is giving GitHub an 
advantage over the open competition.

If KDE mirrors to GitHub, it should keep a policy of never linking to GitHub. 
The route from GitHub to KDE should be only one direction. In practice people 
will start pointing to GitHub instead of 

Cheers,
Jos