From: Dragan Simic Date: Thu, 01 Feb 2024 16:54:23 GMT Subject: Re: Migrate away from vger to GitHub or (on-premise) GitLab? Message-ID: <7e395301c5ff46a69d8aca71eb0bb766@manjaro.org> In-Reply-To: <20240201-primitive-aardwark-of-contentment-aaabb9@lemur> Hello Konstantin, On 2024-02-01 16:39, Konstantin Ryabitsev wrote: > On Thu, Feb 01, 2024 at 12:10:11PM +0000, Hans Meiser wrote: >> is there any current discussion about moving Git development away from >> using >> a mailing list to some modern form of collaboration? >> >> I'd like to be able to follow a structured discussion in issues and to >> contribute to the Git documentation, but the mailing list currently >> just >> bloats my personal inbox with loads of uninteresting e-mails in an >> unstructured waterfall of messy discussion that I am not able to >> follow >> professionally. > > Here's a perspective from the world of Linux kernel, where this > discussion is > continuously raging. Funny enough, the main objection a lot of kernel > maintainers have to forges is that it makes it really hard to find > relevant > discussions once the volume goes above a certain threshold. These folks > have > become *extremely* efficient at querying and filtering the mailing list > traffic, to the point where all they ever see are just those > discussions > relevant to their work. They love the fact that it all arrives into the > same > place (their inbox) without having to go and click on various websites, > each > with their own login information, UI, and preferred workflow. > > The kernel maintainers are able to review tens of thousands of patches > monthly > with only about a hundred or so top maintainers. To them, this system > is > working great, especially now that some tools allow easy ways to query, > retrieve, verify, and apply patches (shameless plug for lore, lei, and > b4 > here). > > The obvious problem, of course, is that these folks are FOSS's > "marathon > runners" who got really good at their workflow, but the situation is > different > for anyone else who is just starting out. Any new kernel maintainer > stepping > up obviously finds this overwhelming, because they aren't yet so good > at > filtering the huge volume of the mailing list traffic and to them it's > just a > torrent of mostly irrelevant patches. > >> Are you consideration for migrating? > > Yes, of course, this is constantly under consideration. There isn't > some sort > of anti-forge cabal that is preventing things from going forward, but > there > are some serious hurdles and considerations to consider: > > - How to avoid a vendor lock-in? Those of us who have been around for a > while > have seen forges bloom, and then shrink into irrelevance (e.g. > bitkeeper) > or slowly ensh*ttify to the point of unusability (sourceforge). > GitHub is a > proprietary service owned by a single company who are currently > FOSS-friendly, but have certainly been extremely FOSS-hostile in the > past. > GitLab is open-core, and the current record for open-core projects > isn't > very encouraging (Puppet open-cored themselves into irrelevance, > Terraform > has gone full-proprietary, among most recent examples). Full-FOSS > alternatives exist, but people aren't really that enthused about > using > less-popular solutions like Forgejo, because they hate unfamiliar UIs > almost > as much, or even more than they hate unfiltered mailing lists. > > - How to avoid centralization and single points of failure? If Linux or > Git > move to a self-hosted forge, how do we ensure that an adversary can't > stop > all development on a project by knocking it offline for weeks? This > has > literally just happened to Sourcehut and Codeberg -- and as far as > anyone > can tell, the attacker was just bored and knocked them out just > because they > could. Yes, you can knock out vger, but this will only impact the > mailing > list -- people can still send around patches and hold discussions by > temporarily moving to alternative hosts. With the distributed nature > of the > mailing list archives, this can even be largely transparent to anyone > using > lei-queries. > > - How to avoid alienating these hundreds of key maintainers who are now > extremely proficient at their query-based workflows? We're talking > about an > extremely finely-tuned engine that is performing remarkably well -- > we don't > want to disrupt development for months just to try things out with a > forge > and find that it isn't working out. > > Finally, there's also the consideration of current trends. One upside > of "AI" > (LLM, really) technologies is that they are extremely good at taking in > a huge > source of data and finding relevant information based on natural > language > queries. I can very easily see a mechanism spring up in the next year > or less > where you can issue a query like "send me any threads about reftables > or > promissory remotes if they contain follow-ups from Junio" and reasonaly > expect > this to work and work great -- all while keeping things decentralized > in > addition to distributed. > > Above all, this isn't a "forges are terrible and shouldn't be used" > response > -- they are clearly useful, especially when it comes to CI > integrations. A > large part of my work is bridging forges with mailing lists and > vice-versa, > which I hope I'll be able to do in the near future (GitGitGadget > already does > it with GitHub, but my goal is to have a pluggable multi-forge > solution). I > just wanted to highlight the aspects that aren't necessarily obvious or > visible from the outside. Thank you very much for taking your time to write this down! Much appreciated.