Back after a little break

[José Fonseca]

On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 8:16 PM, Carl Worth <cworth at cworth.org> wrote:
> Oh, right. I had forgotten this was on github. I'll pass on that,
> then. [*]

What about issues reports, e.g,
https://github.com/apitrace/apitrace/issues/107 . Can you comment, or
should I?

> I think it's a strategic mistake to host free software on non-free
> services.
> I don't have a totally concrete definition of a free service,
> but I think it should provide at least the following:
>
>   1. Users own their own submitted data.
>
>   2. Users can extract their data at any time through a mechanism and
>      format preferred for that data.
>
>   3. The service should be implemented with free software
>
> Non-free services are a big problem across the internet now. And with
> respect to that, github does a lot better than many. For example point
> (1) seems to be in place for all data. That's good.
>
> Point (2) is perfect for the code itself due to the way "git clone"
> works. But I don't think anything is in place for things like the
> website, wiki, issue-tracking, etc. There's an easy test for this one:
> If github.com disappeared from the internet today, would you lose any
> data or any convenience in your ability to edit your data?

I'd only lose the issues. But there are ways to back them up if I
could be bothered (http://developer.github.com/ plus several scripts
out there).

Fact is that I already lost more data/scripts on *.freedesktop.org
alone (due to hardware failures) than on any non-free code hosting
services over the last 15 years. Partly my fault because I didn't
backup every single thing but that's my point: with the non-free
services I never felt the need to backup anything more than the code.

> Another test
> came up in the renaming question above. Can I run a sed job over the
> existing web-site and wiki contnet?

Yes. I do it all the time. website and wiki are just another git repos.

> As far as I'm aware point (3) is not in place for anything on github.

Not the whole website itself. But they seem to maintain repositories
for many components/technologies they use on https://github.com/github

> And I try as much as I can to avoid using software systems where I don't
> have the ability to change the way they work.

I feel like that for some things, but for this particular case, I'm
quite happy with something that works reasonably well and that it
doesn't cost me time/money.

And github doesn't even seem to fare that bad according to your own standards.

Anyway, I don't hope to convince you, but it would be great if you
could own issues on apitrace components you maintain. But no biggie if
you don't. Just want to know what I can expect.

Jose