Re: Migrate away from vger to GitHub or (on-premise) GitLab?

From: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
Date: Feb 2, 2024, 21:28 UTC
Message-ID: <20240202212809.GA36616@mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <xmqq5xz6sn5i.fsf@gitster.g>

On Fri, Feb 02, 2024 at 11:04:41AM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 15 quoted lines

> "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu> writes:
> 
> > So from an open source project perspective, which is primarily run by
> > volunteers, each open source project has to make a cost-benefit
> > tradeoff as far as the *project* is concerned.  Individuals do not
> > have a fundamental human right to contribute to a project.  Hence, the
> > open source project doesn't owe an obligation to spend a huge amount
> > of effort supporting some kind of forge web site just because some
> > potential contributors are clammoring for it.  Especially if they are
> > saying that they can't be bothered to follow the mailing list traffic
> > because it's somehow too much.
> 
> Thanks for saying this (even though with my Devil's advocate hat on,
> I am not sure how strong our "this is run by volunteers, so do not
> demand" card is these days).

Even though a lot of open source developers these days work for companies, it's rare that engineers get to work on whatever they want. More often than not, open source developeres are asked to primarily work on features that have a tie to their employer's business goals. Different companies might call use different corporate-speak; for example, perhaps on e company might use "year of efficiency" or "sharpening our focus", but the reality is that companies are asking engineers to spend more time of features that those companies want.

What this tends to mean is that engineers have less time to do community work --- such as code reviews --- or they have to do that work "on their own time", e.g., late at night or on weekends. Those of us who work as project leads, or subsystem leads for open source projects, are trying to push back against this dynamic, because there is always maintenance work that need to be done to keep the project healthy, including bug scrubbing, code review, improving tests, etc.

As a Linux kernel subsystem maintainer, I am super grateful for those who do code reviews and those who work test regressions, because in general, that which doesn't get done by other developers ends up getting done by the maintainers and project leads if it's going to happen at all.

When it comes to requests like "you should migrate the project to use some forge web site, because we can't be bothered to use e-mail, and web interfaces are the new hotness", the entitlement that comes from that request (which is in the subject line of this thread), can sometimes be a bit frustrating.

Going back to the original topic of this thread, my personal experience has been that the *vest* percentage of pull requests that I get from github tend to be drive-by pull requests that are very low quality, especially compared to those that I get via the mailing list. So making a change to use a forge which might result in a larger number of lower quality code contributions, when code review bandwidth might be more of a bottlenck, might not be as appealing as some might think.

					- Ted