Re: Remaining TODOs to finish migration from CVS to Git

[Boruch Baum <boruch_baum@xxxxxxx>]

Great points Vladimir, but why did you wait so many months, until after
the work was done, in order to offer your input?

On 2019-02-03 15:19, Vladimir Sedach wrote:
> > Well, I know.  However, I am still worried about the suitable service of
> > our project home page.  GitHub Pages is a good service to use easily,
> > however, I am still unhappy as an English non-native because GitHub
> > Pages does not support content negotiation feature.  The current project
> > page (http://emacs-w3m.namazu.org) uses it, and we can see an
> > appropriate page automatically.
>
> Also be aware that Github is owned by Microsoft, and has many issues
> around privacy, not being Free Software, and not having any
> guarantees about services being changed or being shut down.

Everything you say is correct, and I'm not aware of anyone claiming to
have software to be a drop-in replacement for github. Do keep in mind,
though that github does provide repository owners the ability to easily
backup ancillary data, such as issues, pull requests, wikis, to a
neutral format (I think its json, but it might be xml), that _should_ be
importable by other strategies.

Maybe had you made the arguments months ago, the project would never
have chosen github?

My personal inclination is that: 1) using github will be much better for
the project than the situation of the last fifteen years; 2) for what
the project does, a decision at some point in the future to abandon
github in favor of some other option wouldn't be a big deal (pretty much
everything is cc'ed to the mailing list, which was the pre-github
method); 3) there's nothing 'private' about the project for github
privacy to be an issue, and while the old system of using a mailing list
exposes your email address to everyone world-wide, posting to github
does not.

If the project does decide to move to some other git host strategy, I
don't have any objection in principle.

> But most importantly of all, Github does not work very well with w3m.

That is *theoretically* a big issue, but in practice, not so much,
because github has great command line support, great emacs support, and
I can browse the site reasonably well in emacs-w3m. BTW, I've found the
situation with gitlab really *is* awful, and can't do much of anything
there without a javascript-enabled browser.

> For this reason I suggest *not* using Github pages or wikis.
> EmacsWiki is there and is a much more future-proof wiki than Github.

I can see both sides of this, and would abide by any decision or
consensus that the project reaches.

> I also think it is better to continue development by mailing patches
> to the mailing list, than Github pull requests.

Here I do disagree, Vladimir. It's much easier to track issues and
patches on any form of board, even if its just forum software, than on a
mailing list. The github interface is pleasant and easy to use, and
although I haven't tried them, is known to have options for use from
within emacs (magithub, ghub, etc) or from the command line (hub, etc).

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