If I were them I'd move issue tracking to GH too _in addition_ to the current tracker. Having GH issues that are familiar to developers lowers the barrier for feature requests and bug reports which is a huge deal for a language.
Python moves to GitHub
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Re: Python moves to GitHub
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure why it's a problem though. If they decide to go down that path, it's not that hard to move off. They don't have the lock-in that would scare me like having terabytes of data in an oracle database.
The problem is with people's mindset that everything has to be on github. Large projects that dare to use self-hosted more fitting infrastructure like Phabricator tend to be punished socially.
What does "punished socially" even mean?
Unable to attract as many contributors? The cold reality is that most open source projects aren't really TRYING to attract contributors. Small-time hobbyists often don't want to play with others in their personal project sandboxes, and big-time projects with high profile usually put up high barriers to contribution.
Unable to attract as many end-users, or as much public mindshare? Now this makes more sense. Many of the high-profile moves to GitHub are really about P.R., and signaling friendless to the developer community (e.g. Microsoft's recent image re-branding efforts). Not having a GitHub presence DOES make you less visible and more isolated from developers today.
Either way, I would argue that GitHub is really just a sort of Facebook or Twitter-like presence for software organizations. A way to draw attention, publicity, or mindshare from the public... but often merely a hosting mirror, and not even the primary toolset through which the software is actually developed.
This being the case, who cares if GitHub is dominant? Or SourceForge ten years ago, or whatever the next popular thing might be ten years from now? In most cases, it's effectively about as consequential as having to shift your focus from MySpace to Facebook when the audience moves.
Re: Python moves to GitHub
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really, the inconvenience of having to register another account (which often means another set of password) is quite a big deal for entry.
I'd consider "single sign on that connects me to tons of projects' repos to be great UX. Personally, it (and the centralized API) are big reasons I use GitHub to interact with projects whenever possible
Centralizing the "hub" pretty much negates the distributed aspect of a dvcs, and github has no incentive to invest in extending git to be even more distributed ala fossil or bittorent, to mention two not quite fitting but conveying the point examples. Maybe git-appraisal will grow into something good.
Re: Python moves to GitHub
#24Re: Python moves to GitHub
#25"Guido prefers GitHub"
Re: Python moves to GitHub
#26this is pretty significant; so far the only git presence of Python was a "semi-official readonly mirror" on github: https://github.com/python/cpython now does this mean that Python will completely switch away from Mercurial? this was one of the major projects still using hg what does this mean for mercurial's global adoption vs git? also, i don't understand why the free software aspect of gitlab wasn't an important a…
Well, Facebook is probably the single largest corporate user of Hg in terms of repo size and investment into the tool. In terms of influencing global adoption, they probably pull more weight in the community than Python did.
Re: Python moves to GitHub
#27this is pretty significant; so far the only git presence of Python was a "semi-official readonly mirror" on github: https://github.com/python/cpython now does this mean that Python will completely switch away from Mercurial? this was one of the major projects still using hg what does this mean for mercurial's global adoption vs git? also, i don't understand why the free software aspect of gitlab wasn't an important a…
That's what I'm wondering, too. Mercurial (which I prefer) seems to still have pretty decent usage in the Python world. And Bitbucket still pretty Mercurial.
Re: Python moves to GitHub
#28Everyone is moving to GitHub these days. Why doesn't Gitlab.com get more love? Isn't their whole stack open source?
Source code hosting is an area where longevity is probably the single most important factor.
Re: Python moves to GitHub
#29If there ever was a company that became 'too big to fail' it is github. A major security breach at github would have earth shaking consequences and if they ever went out of business it would take a long time before the rift was healed.
Re: Python moves to GitHub
#30GitHub's reign over public open source programming is a bit terrifying. But, it's been mostly benevolent so far, but I do find it troubling to trust a private company to keep dev's in mind, and not profit.
The good news is that it is straightforward to make a copy of much of the important public data on GH.
It goes a lot further than that. Github quite literally becomes the hub of the projects it hosts. Without the hub the spokes will have to reconnect and many of the glue bits will be lost in the process and some of those bits are very important. A public home is a very important thing to an open source project.