[sane-devel] [janitorial] Relocating the SANE Project

[Markus Heiser]

Hi,

nothing 'new' just my 2cent ...

> Am 08.01.2018 um 08:46 schrieb Olaf Meeuwissen <paddy-hack at member.fsf.org>:
> 
> Dear all,
> 
> # Project members explicitly BCC:d, just in case they don't subscribe.
> # Project admins CC:d to make sure they take note ;-)
> # Replies to the list, please.
> 
> Since 2003-09-06, the SANE Project has been kindly hosted on Debian's
> Alioth.  The Debian project has deprecated[1] this service and intends
> to discontinue[*] it when Debian Wheezy becomes EOL.  While that seems
> to be slated[2] for 2018-05-31, the Alioth wiki page's News[3] section
> states 2018-05-01 for Alioth itself and 2018-02-01 for mailing lists.
> 
> [*]: It is not quite clear what that exactly entails but at best the
>      service will become read-only.
> 
> A Debian-backed GitLab-based replacement has been announced[4] in beta
> and it looks like there may be a temporary continuation of the mailing
> lists[5] but *nothing* will be migrated automatically.  Everything has
> to be done explicitly.
> 
> That is, if we don't act, the SANE Project will no longer be able to:
> 
> - communicate via the mailing lists
> - push commits to its official git repositories
> - update the bug and feature requests trackers
> - update its website
> 
> So we have to move some place else for our project hosting but where?
> 
> The Debian-backed GitLab-based replacement[6] is one option.  Two others
> are GitLab.com[7] and GitHub.com[8].  None of these provides support for
> mailing lists so we need something else for that.

about mailing-lists ...

SANE maintainer & code-contriubutor POV: 
- con: ML must be maintained
- con: Pull Request are 'local & handmade' no (public) CI for PR & discussion

rare visitors POV:
- pro: No git-hoster (github.com or gitlab.com) account needed / just a mail to ML

IMO overall: maintain issue tracker, PRs and ... from a git-hoster in
parallel with a ML is a lot of work and mostly confusing. Thats why
I would recommend to drop the ML when moving to a git-hoster. The drawback;
all contributors (even rare visitors) will need a account by the git-hoster.
Another drawback: the old history of the ML will be lost.

So IMO this must be the first decision; drop ML or search for an alternative.


>  Migrating to Debian's
> temporary continuation is one option.  Any other suggestions?  As for
> the website, all three (will) have support for *static* webpages.  The
> trackers are covered by the issue systems of all three.
> 
> [1]: https://wiki.debian.org/Alioth#Deprecation_of_Alioth
> [2]: https://wiki.debian.org/LTS
> [3]: https://wiki.debian.org/Alioth#News
> [4]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2017/12/msg00003.html
> [5]: https://wiki.debian.org/Alioth/MailingListContinuation
> [6]: https://salsa.debian.org
> [7]: https://gitlab.com
> [8]: https://github.com
> 
> You may remember that I set up an *unofficial* SANE Project group[9] on
> GitLab.com to play around with GitLab CI that mirrors the project's git
> repositories on Alioth.  We could use that.  I have also created a stub
> on GitHub.com[10] and two on Debian's GitLab[11][12] (which enforces a
> *-team naming convention for groups :-() to reserve the names.
> 
> [9]: https://gitlab.com/sane-project
> [10]: https://github.com/sane-project
> [11]: https://salsa.debian.org/sane-team
> [12]: https://salsa.debian.org/sane-project-team
> 
> I am personally in favour of using something we could in principle run
> ourselves. That would rule out GitHub.com.


What I do: I host my public repos at github. Locally I have a self hosted
gitlab instance. It is very easy to move from github to gitlab including
issue tracker and other meta data.

  https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/import/github.html

What I mean: if you decide for github.com and there comes a day you are
pissed of by, it is easy to move from github.com to gitlab.com
or to a self hosted gitlab instance.


>   Also, it is not clear yet
> when website hosting becomes possible or to what extent Debian's GitLab
> instance will provide CI runners (needed to publish the website), so
> *my* preference is GitLab.com (steering clear of its enterprise-only
> functionality).
> 
> What are your preferences?  Feel free to mention other options.

As said I'am using self-hosted gitlab and github.com. For public
things I prefer github.com over gitlab.com. My impression is, that
there are more potential contributors on github.com because its
more popular.

Yes, I know there are static pages with github.io but I don't
like them. To often I see non-reproducible errors where URLs
are not working (very strange behavior I have seen there ..
is it only to me? .. I don't know).

Another "pro" for gitlab.com I see is omniauth, so rare contributors
can use their github.com account to login gitlab.com: 

  https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/integration/omniauth.html

At the end I have to say, that I like to prefer the gitlab way.
Anyway, the truth is that github.com is more popular. As a
result the number of potential contributors is larger and this
results in a much more dynamic development.

Hope that gives new arguments for a tradeoff.

-- Markus --

> 
> Hope this helps,
> --
> Olaf Meeuwissen, LPIC-2            FSF Associate Member since 2004-01-27
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