GitHub considered harmful

Alexander Larsson alexl at redhat.com
Fri Oct 11 08:20:21 UTC 2019


On Thu, Oct 10, 2019 at 11:10 AM Mathieu Bridon <bochecha at daitauha.fr> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 2019-10-10 at 10:53 +0200, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > On Thu, Oct 10, 2019 at 12:35 AM Michael Gratton <mike at vee.net>
> > wrote:
> > > Would it be possible to get an idea of what the main technical
> > > hurdles for this would be? From my perspective the two big issues
> > > are automating the migration of the repos and updating the build
> > > infrastructure and integration. Does that sound about right?
> >
> > From a pure technical perspective: Migration of repos is trivial with
> > git, but migration of issues and history with things like references
> > to PRs etc is much more complicated.
>
> Last I imported a Github project into Gitlab, the importer built into
> Gitlab correctly imported all the merge requests and issues, with
> correct references, in addition to the Git repo.
>
> If contributors have an account in the destination Gitlab and have
> linked it to their Github account, then all attribution (issues, merge
> requests, …) is preserved as well.
>
> I was impressed by how well it worked, and had to redo it a few times
> before I believed it. :)

That's pretty cool actually!

> > I realize people might not want to use github for this (or whatever
> > other personal reason) though, so we should maybe look at alternative
> > ways for people to submit code. For example, I already own
> > https://gitlab.com/flatpak, and we could easily set up a mirror of
> > github there, and then you can branch that and email merge requests.
>
> Could we have a Flathub organization on (for example) gitlab.com **in
> addition** to Github, and the Flathub maintainers who wish to maintain
> their projects there could do the switch?

Having a read-only flatpak gitlab mirror is a single-click thing and
would allow users to clone/fork/work on the flatpak code without
requiring a github account (although actually upstreaming the result
would be slightly more painful).

However, the flathub setup is much more complicated as there is a 1:1
mapping between repo ids in the organization and app ids, as well as
lots of automation based on github APIs. I'm sure its possible to
duplicate similar things in gitlab, but using the two at the same time
will probably be hard.

Also, it seems that gitlab isn't necessarily the right place for the
morally conscious:
 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/30656/diffs



More information about the Flatpak mailing list