to git or not to git

Paul Boddie paul at boddie.org.uk
Sun Sep 9 21:45:55 UTC 2018


On Saturday 8. September 2018 10.36.08 Adonay Felipe Nogueira wrote:
> I won't cite any past message because I lost some of them during an
> accidental removal of the emails on my computer, so forgive me if this
> was already said by someone else.

Having just done a distribution upgrade and with Akonadi now playing around 
with my mail, hopefully not losing any, I sympathise with you in this 
situation.

> Personally, I don't think we need to dive down into completely different
> VCS software just because a VCS repository provider decided to go evil.
> We can still use Git but push people to not to use GitHub, not because
> of the recent Microsoft acquisition, but due to a problem we have been
> facing many months before that, which is even worse than the
> acquisition: non-free software being forced to the people who visit the
> GitHub website, through client-side JavaScript[1].

Indeed, there are plenty of issues with the Web and the proliferation of 
obligatory non-free scripts. While upgrading my system, I found myself passing 
the time by using a single-board computer with a CPU running at "only" 1.2GHz, 
but also with 1GB RAM, which is actually what my normal, ancient, 3GHz Intel 
machine has. The network performance might not be great on this single-board 
machine, though.

One thing I noticed was that the /etc/hosts-based blocking I normally do might 
well make a difference, because I was suddenly needing to watch Firefox pull 
down content from various "ad markets" in slow motion. Such things really make 
the Web unusable for certain kinds of devices, and I start to think that we 
might need to make a case for a Web that is not so wasteful and intrusive, 
with the Web having seemingly taken over the role of Windows as the thing that 
causes people to junk their hardware every 18 months (or however often it is 
now).

> GNU Savannah provides Git repository hosting too, and is powered by GNU
> Savane, a host software that you can use on your own[2]. There is an
> ongoing effort by the Peers Community to make a VCS hosting software
> called Vervis[3]. Besides there is host software called Kallithea[4]
> (partly maintained by the Software Freedom Conservancy, which has the
> plus of already providing correctly-marked free/libre client-side
> JavaScript, and also has many features to allow commits to be made from
> the web browser) and there is Pagure[5] (which I don't know how good or
> bad it is in terms of software freedom for the
> end-user/website-visitor). All of these, as far as I know, work with Git.

Kallithea is certainly interesting, and not only does it work with Mercurial, 
too, but it provides an example of forking a project to uphold Free Software 
values. Unfortunately, it seems to need more resources behind it, illustrating 
the problems that I and others have found ourselves mentioning rather a lot in 
the recent past.

Paul

> [1] https://www.gnu.org/software/repo-criteria-evaluation.html#GitHub
> 
> [2] https://savannah.gnu.org/p/administration
> 
> [3] https://peers.community/#projects
> 
> [4] https://kallithea-scm.org/
> 
> [5] https://pagure.io/pagure



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