[kde-community] Official KDE mirror on github

[Ben Cooksley]

On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 6:55 PM, Jos van den Oever <jos at vandenoever.info> wrote:
> 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?

This is part of a problem with our existing web and git infrastructure
unfortunately.
The project pages on projects.kde.org were initially intended to be
used as a sort of "hub" for development with useful links - but very
few projects actually used them.

Not helping matters that the urls are rather long (courtesy of
sysadmin trying to preserve the Subversion tree structure of
playground/extragear/etc) and thus difficult to remember and type
conveniently.

>
>> * 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.

The Manifesto doesn't disallow mirrors. It does disallow using an
external host for the primary development repository.

>
>> 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

Regards,
Ben

>
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