[kde-community] Official KDE mirror on github

[Boudhayan Gupta]

On 19 September 2015 at 20:52, Vishesh Handa <me at vhanda.in> wrote:
> Relevant part - "Online services associated with the project are
> either hosted on KDE infrastructure or have an action plan that
> ensures continuity which is approved by the KDE system administration
> team"

The sysadmin team does *not* have an action plan that ensures
continuity in case GitHub goes down. This is the entire reason we
don't want any inbound traffic from GitHub to KDE's infra. We cannot
rely on GitHub being available. This is entirely why we're not
treating GitHub (from a sysadmin perspective) any better than a
random, replaceable anongit server.

>> Common ownership. There's a difference between any random open source
>> project on GitHub/SF.net/elsewhere and a KDE project. Maintainers are
>> responsible for their own projects (that's why they're maintainers).
>> They're also responsible for playing nice with the rest of the
>> community and abiding by the requirements of the rest of the
>> community.
>
> And how does also accepting github requests not play nice with the
> rest of the community?

Because that would imply the KDE sysadmin team would have to give
preferential treatment to GitHub, an entity which do not have any
control over, which should be of concern to the community because then
part of the development workflow depends on factors beyond our
control. Ideally we'd like to minimise elements we have no control
over, to nothing more than weather, natural calamities and utility
grids.

> "governance" is quite a vague word over here.
>
> Release cycles, documentation, QA, online infrastructure? what exactly?

All of it. We have clearly defined release cycles that we must abide
by, documentation standards that we must abide by, QA standards,
etc...

> I think we're talking about different things. The read-only mirror is
> done, and shipped. I was talking about projects being able to also use
> github, and the rest of the community respecting that decision.

Precisely. Martin's original suggestion, which we have shipped, was to
provide a read only mirror on GitHub for the drive-by folks who only
check GitHub for open source code. It is important to note that the
developers have no control over this organization on GitHub (only the
sysadmins do - even I was removed after I finished all my scripting),
nor should they (just like they don't have write access to the anongit
servers). I re-iterate - GitHub, at the moment, is nothing more than a
(smart) anongit server. And we (the sysadmins) are not inclined to
treat it any better than that because it's not under our control and
we will not be able to guarantee that it'll work two weeks from now.

If you want to "use github", whatever that means, by all means
maintain a repo under your personal account, and continue to use it as
you were using it. No one's stopping you.