Gitorious, and deployment

Christopher Allan Webber at 2015-03-04T17:34:22Z

First of all: thanks for all the years of hosting MediaGoblin, Gitorious team! Genuine thanks! It has helped us a lot!

I'm a bit bummed out by the gitorious->gitlab move. Maybe we should just use gitlab's hosted version for MediaGoblin, but it's the proprietary edition, and I am not excited about it.

I suppose I could "host my own". It's a lot of work and I already barely have enough time to hack. It would take away from doing real MediaGoblin work. It's a huge irony that I feel this way. The "deploying free software" situation is terrible. If it doesn't get better, network freedom stuff is doomed to failure. There's some "free software dark ages" for you.

In other news, consider joining the userops mailing list. More on that soon, I hope.

Aaron Wolf, Mike Linksvayer, Olivier Mehani, David Thompson and 1 others likes this.

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First mailing list I've rushed out to join is a while. Thanks for starting/hosting it.

Freemor at 2015-03-04T19:01:20Z

Christopher Allan Webber likes this.

"Thanks" was my first thought too.

Thanks Gitorious for sponsoring the code hosting of so many free software projects for many years. I know it must have taken a lot of work to set up and maintain all that infrastructure. Thanks also for developing a great piece of free software; AGPL to boot. I hope you have made some money from the sale of your company and are able to continue to contribute to free software.

Looking at the bigger picture, we have an enormous number of developers using GitHub without being aware of the issues around centralised network services and non-free Javascript. There's a great opportunity for disruption here, and Gitlab is at least on the right track. Without a free-of-charge hosted version with private repositories, the bar is too high for GitHub users to consider switching.

Beyond that, we also need decentralisation so that you don't have to sign up to someone's code hosting site just to post a patch (email doesn't count). Oh, and trivial deployment of your own code hosting (without some big hairball like the current Gitlab download).

Ben Sturmfels at 2015-03-05T03:08:38Z

Christopher Allan Webber, Charles Stanhope, Mike Linksvayer likes this.

Thanks for thanking the Gitorious folks for their years of effort in offering this service. Their efforts seem to have gotten largely lost in the hullaballoo around the announcement.

We have LUG resources through Rackspace, and they have a means of easily deploying gitlab. There is still the ongoing maintenance associated with that, though.

Seems like it would be good if we could get people from a couple of impacted projects to help share the burden, if folks want to self-host. The whole, "If you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go long, go together," kind of thing. Hosting a repository seems like a good, "go together," kind of area.

j1mc at 2015-03-05T04:22:01Z

Christopher Allan Webber, Charles Stanhope, Ben Sturmfels likes this.

I think we all need to get a working group together and decide on some collaborative plan. Instead of leaving all the software-freedom-concerned folks to just figure this out for each project, we need to determine the best way forward we can all rally around and support one another.

I'd rather pay a little for hosting via a host that was *only* for libre projects vs be a customer of a generic host.

What do you think of the new initiative at https://notabug.org/ ? That's software-freedom-dedicated folks there, but Gogs is something I haven't tried (seems promising though, but it isn't AGPL).

Aaron Wolf at 2015-03-05T05:56:38Z

Christopher Allan Webber, Charles Stanhope likes this.