[Python-Dev] Microsoft to acquire GitHub for $7.5 b (original) (raw)

Chris Angelico rosuav at gmail.com
Thu Jun 7 14:24:26 EDT 2018

On Fri, Jun 8, 2018 at 3:33 AM, Chris Barker - NOAA Federal via Python-Dev <python-dev at python.org> wrote:

Any service could change or fail. Period.

So we shouldn’t want valuable information about Python development only in gitHub. I don’t know how hard it is to backup / mirror an entire repo — but it sure seems like a good idea.

There are two separate concerns here:

  1. How do we get a full copy of all of CPython and its change history?

  2. How do we get all the non-code content - issues, pull requests, comments?

The first one is trivially easy. Everyone who has a clone of the repository [1] has a full copy of the code and all history, updated every time 'git pull' is run.

The second one depends on GitHub's exporting facilities; but it also depends on a definition of what's important. Maybe the PSF doesn't care if people's comments at the bottoms of commits are lost (not to be confused with commit messages themselves, which are part of the repo proper), so it wouldn't matter if they're lost. Or maybe it's important to have the contents of such commits, but it's okay to credit them to an email address rather than linking to an actual username. Or whatever. Unlike with the code/history repo, an imperfect export is still of partial value.

ChrisA

[1] Barring shallow clones, but most people don't do those

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