[kde-community] Have repo maintainers opt-in for github mirroring (was: Re: Official KDE mirror on github)

[Friedrich W. H. Kossebau]

Am Samstag, 19. September 2015, 08:37:54 schrieb Ben Cooksley:
> On Sat, Sep 19, 2015 at 8:10 AM, Friedrich W. H. Kossebau
> 
> <kossebau at kde.org> wrote:
> > Am Freitag, 18. September 2015, 17:12:12 schrieb Boudhayan Gupta:
> > Can we please only mirror those projects whose maintainers are okay with
> > the added workload due to another public interface which allows
> > interaction from 3rd-party? Too many people will not get that this is
> > only a mirror, even if you put it in bold there. Or worse, not accept it
> > is a mirror, because their time is more valueable than the time of the
> > maintainers of course.
> > 
> > I have no time (and actually also no interest) to care for people poking
> > via github (incl. the time needed to redirect them to the real official
> > KDE infrastructure and any bad vibrations because having to argue why
> > I/we do not support github really). Other people might have that time and
> > interest, so their decision.
> > But I don't. I joined KDE for some reason and am doing my FLOSS software
> > development here, because of certain values.
> > Same would be true for sourceforge.net, gitlab.com, code.google.com (okay,
> > dead) or whereever else some people think we should mirror because it's
> > where "the people" are currently.
> > 
> > So as maintainer I would like to have at least the repos of Okteta,
> > libkoralle, cagibi removed from the official KDE github page.
> 
> Sorry, but an incomplete mirror would cost additional effort to
> maintain, as sysadmin would have to maintain a list of repositories
> which were blacklisted.

Could that effort not be crowd-sourced, as with the build metadata?

> Note that because a chunk of the code that drives this is in bash, it
> is not easy to create such a list easily.
> 
> Additionally, an incomplete mirror would be confusing to those who
> expect the mirror to be complete - so this blacklist would result in
> Sysadmin receving queries of "why isn't this repository on Github?".

Who would expect the mirror to be complete? Besides, that could be mentioned 
in the description on github.com/KDE:

"Official mirror of the KDE project. Only contains repos of projects whose 
maintainers support it."

And "KDE Github Mirror" perhaps should be "KDE Github Readonly Mirror".

> I suggest you instead put a clear notice in the README file noting
> that patches and other code contributions should be submitted via our
> usual infrastructure.

People do not read READMEs, I lost my hopes there at least. Because most 
READMEs are outdated/unmaintained. So not really sure people can be blamed for 
that behaviour.

> If people do ignore that notice and submit stuff via Github pull
> requests, they can be handled by the bot suggested on the other thread
> - or simply ignored (as the person failed to read our instructions).

Which opens a chance for people being pissed off because their effort on 
creating a patch is ignored, when they just missed the note that it's not 
possible. And I do not like to piss off people. But I also do not like using 
github for my FLOSS work. So now I feel forced to support people on github -> 
me not happy, questioning KDE values.

So if I look at the problems presented initially in look for a solution:
* people not finding our git repositories
* people being surprised that our code is not on github
* some projects starting to use github in addition to our own infrastructure

For the first, my answer is not: mirror on github, but rather: make this info 
better accessable (heck, perhaps simply put in the About dialog, in a new tab 
"Developers").
People who are surprised our code is not on github: have a page explaining 
why. Education is needed.
If some projects started to use github, they might have specific needs, which 
should be investigated and learned from how we could improve our 
infrastructure to meet that.

I miss to see why e.g. Okteta code should be mirrored on github officially by 
KDE, if the full power of github is not used. This does not make any sense to 
me. Who is targetted here, for what?

I only see lose-lose, making ourselves feel our infrastructure is anything but 
usable and giving a bad experience on github ("suckers just have bots telling 
me to represent my patch in some alien infrastructure that I first have to 
learn now additionally, why here and not using github?!1").

Cheers
Friedrich