[Python-Dev] PEP 481 - Migrate Some Supporting Repositories to Git and Github (original) (raw)

Ian Cordasco graffatcolmingov at gmail.com
Sun Nov 30 16:54:43 CET 2014

On Sun, Nov 30, 2014 at 7:01 AM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:

On Sun, 30 Nov 2014 16:23:08 +1100 Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:

Yes, GitHub is proprietary. But all of your actual code is stored in git, which is free, and it's easy to push that to a new host somewhere else, or create your own host. This proposal is for repositories that don't need much in the way of issue trackers etc, so shifting away from GitHub shouldn't demand anything beyond moving the repos themselves. I hope we're not proposing to move the issue trackers to github, otherwise I'm -1 on this PEP. Regards Antoine.

So I usually choose not to weigh in on discussions like these but there seems to be a lot of misdirection in some of these arguments.

To start, I'm generally neutral about this proposal or Nick's proposal that spurred this one. I've found the most frustrating part of contributing to anything involving CPython to be the lack of reviewer time. I have had very small (2-line) patches take months (close to a year in reality) to get through in spite of periodically pinging the appropriate people. Moving to git/GitHub will not alleviate this at all.

To be clear, the main reasoning behind Nick's was being able to submit changes without ever having to have a local copy of the repository in question on your machine. Having a complete web workflow for editing and contributing makes the barrier to entry far lower than switching VCS or anything else. BitBucket (apparently, although I've never used this) and GitHub both have this capability and both are free-as-in-beer systems.

No one as I understand it is proposing that we use the per-distro proprietary interface to these websites.

All data can be removed from GitHub using it's API and can generally be converted to another platform. The same goes for BitBucket although it's arguably easier to retrieve issue data from BitBucket than GitHub. That said, the issue tracker is not covered by these proposals so this is a moot point. Drop it already.

If we're seriously considering moving to git as a DVCS, we should consider the real free-as-in-freedom alternatives that come very close to GitHub and can be improved by us (even though they're not written in Python). One of those is GitLab. We can self-host a GitLab instance easily or we can rely on gitlab.com. GitLab aims to provide a very similar user experience to GitHub and it's slowly approaching feature parity and experience parity. GitLab is also what a lot of people chose to switch to after the incident Steven mentioned, which I don't think is something we should dismiss or ignore.

We should refocus the discussion with the following in mind:

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