[Python-Dev] Move selected documentation repos to PSF BitBucket account? (original) (raw)

Donald Stufft donald at stufft.io
Fri Nov 21 17:00:53 CET 2014

On Nov 21, 2014, at 10:26 AM, Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:

On Nov 21, 2014, at 10:36 PM, Nick Coghlan wrote:

I'd been taking "must be hosted in PSF infrastructure" as a hard requirement, but MAL pointed out earlier this evening that in the age of DVCS's, that requirement may not make sense: if you avoid tightly coupling your automation to a particular DVCS host's infrastructure, then reverting back to self-hosting (if that becomes necessary for some reason) is mostly just a matter of "hg push".

If that "must be self-hosted" constraint is removed, then the obvious candidate for Mercurial hosting that supports online editing + pull requests is the PSF's BitBucket account. For the record, I object to moving official PSF resources to proprietary, closed-source infrastructure that we do not control or have access to[*]. As nice and friendly as BitBucket or any other code hosting source is today, there are many reasons why I think this is a bad idea for official branches. We are beholden to their policies and operations, which may not align with PSF policies or principles today or in the future. We will not be able to customize the experience for our own needs. We will not have access to the underlying resources should we need them for any purpose. We cannot take action ourselves if some problem occurs, e.g. banning an offensive user. You're right that in a world of dvcs, branches can be mirrored anywhere. For that reason, I have no problem allowing developers to use non-PSF controlled resources unofficially if it makes their work easier and doesn't conflict with their own principles. However, in such cases, I still believe that the official, master, blessed repositories remain on PSF controlled infrastructure. Surely that too is possible in the world of dvcs, right? Cheers, -Barry [*] Please note that I am not objecting to our use of lower-level resources donated by our generous sponsors. It's a fine line perhaps, but I have no problem with a wiki running on a VM hosted on some donated hardware, since we still have full access to the machine, the OS, and the application software.

Personally I care less about proprietary and closed-source and care a lot more about lock-in. Thus my big problem using Bitbucket for these things is that if we ever want to leave bitbucket it becomes a lot harder because you have a bunch of links and such pointing at bitbucket instead of a python.org domain. They do offer a redirect feature but that is dependent on them not taking that away in the future. (They also offer a CNAME feature but if you use it you lose the ability to use TLS, which is also a non starter for me). Sadly this also leaves out my favorite host site of Github :/. Something like Github Enterprise or Atlassian stash which are able to be migrated away from are better in this regards.

Ironically we do use a propetiary/closed-source/hosted solution for https://status.python.org/ but it’s not terribly difficult to migrate away from that if we ever wanted to.

Donald Stufft PGP: 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA

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