Re: git-scm.com status report

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Feb 6, 2017, 16:24 UTC
Message-ID: <20170206162436.wiydnq7sv43wqg3d@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <CAFZEwPPX4LngKrOHxgEp4aMGKOs0w4LHUBKumtmeRJSZ2_iV_Q@mail.gmail.com>

On Mon, Feb 06, 2017 at 01:41:04AM +0530, Pranit Bauva wrote:

Show 14 quoted lines

> On Thu, Feb 2, 2017 at 8:03 AM, Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:
> > ## What's on the site
> >
> > We have the domains git-scm.com and git-scm.org (the latter we've had
> > for a while). They both point to the same website, which has general
> > information about Git, including:
> 
> Since we have an "official" control over the website, shouldn't we be
> using the .org domain more because we are more of an organization?
> What I mean is that in many places, we have referred to git-scm.com,
> which was perfectly fine because it was done by github which is a
> company but now I think it would be more appropriate to use
> git-scm.org domain. We can forward all .com requests to .org and try
> to move all reference we know about, to .org. What do you all think?

I don't have a preference myself. I know a lot of non-commercial groups (which I think the Git project is) try to prefer ".org" to signal that.

Switching it around would require some DNS changes. I think ".org" goes to a server the DNS provider (Gandi) runs which issues an HTTP 301 to ".com". So we'd want to reverse that, or possibly just treat them both as equals. That shouldn't be too hard, and will have to be done via Conservancy.

I don't know what it would mean in terms of search-engine optimization. I know Google tries to detect duplicate names for sites and treat one as canonical. And that's going to be ".com" now, based on the existing redirect and on the fact that most people will have linked to .com.

I'm not sure what disadvantages there are to switching now, or if there are things we should be doing to tell search engines (I seem to recall Google's Webmaster tools have options to say "this is the canonical name"). This is pretty far outside my area of expertise, so it may not even be something to care about at all. Just things to consider (and hopefully more clueful people than I can comment on it).

-Peff