Re: Migrate away from vger to GitHub or (on-premise) GitLab?

[Dragan Simic <dsimic@manjaro.org>]

Hello Konstantin,

On 2024-02-01 16:39, Konstantin Ryabitsev wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 01, 2024 at 12:10:11PM +0000, Hans Meiser wrote:
>> is there any current discussion about moving Git development away from 
>> using
>> a mailing list to some modern form of collaboration?
>> 
>> I'd like to be able to follow a structured discussion in issues and to
>> contribute to the Git documentation, but the mailing list currently 
>> just
>> bloats my personal inbox with loads of uninteresting e-mails in an
>> unstructured waterfall of messy discussion that I am not able to 
>> follow
>> professionally.
> 
> Here's a perspective from the world of Linux kernel, where this 
> discussion is
> continuously raging. Funny enough, the main objection a lot of kernel
> maintainers have to forges is that it makes it really hard to find 
> relevant
> discussions once the volume goes above a certain threshold. These folks 
> have
> become *extremely* efficient at querying and filtering the mailing list
> traffic, to the point where all they ever see are just those 
> discussions
> relevant to their work. They love the fact that it all arrives into the 
> same
> place (their inbox) without having to go and click on various websites, 
> each
> with their own login information, UI, and preferred workflow.
> 
> The kernel maintainers are able to review tens of thousands of patches 
> monthly
> with only about a hundred or so top maintainers. To them, this system 
> is
> working great, especially now that some tools allow easy ways to query,
> retrieve, verify, and apply patches (shameless plug for lore, lei, and 
> b4
> here).
> 
> The obvious problem, of course, is that these folks are FOSS's 
> "marathon
> runners" who got really good at their workflow, but the situation is 
> different
> for anyone else who is just starting out. Any new kernel maintainer 
> stepping
> up obviously finds this overwhelming, because they aren't yet so good 
> at
> filtering the huge volume of the mailing list traffic and to them it's 
> just a
> torrent of mostly irrelevant patches.
> 
>> Are you consideration for migrating?
> 
> Yes, of course, this is constantly under consideration. There isn't 
> some sort
> of anti-forge cabal that is preventing things from going forward, but 
> there
> are some serious hurdles and considerations to consider:
> 
> - How to avoid a vendor lock-in? Those of us who have been around for a 
> while
>   have seen forges bloom, and then shrink into irrelevance (e.g. 
> bitkeeper)
>   or slowly ensh*ttify to the point of unusability (sourceforge). 
> GitHub is a
>   proprietary service owned by a single company who are currently
>   FOSS-friendly, but have certainly been extremely FOSS-hostile in the 
> past.
>   GitLab is open-core, and the current record for open-core projects 
> isn't
>   very encouraging (Puppet open-cored themselves into irrelevance, 
> Terraform
>   has gone full-proprietary, among most recent examples). Full-FOSS
>   alternatives exist, but people aren't really that enthused about 
> using
>   less-popular solutions like Forgejo, because they hate unfamiliar UIs 
> almost
>   as much, or even more than they hate unfiltered mailing lists.
> 
> - How to avoid centralization and single points of failure? If Linux or 
> Git
>   move to a self-hosted forge, how do we ensure that an adversary can't 
> stop
>   all development on a project by knocking it offline for weeks? This 
> has
>   literally just happened to Sourcehut and Codeberg -- and as far as 
> anyone
>   can tell, the attacker was just bored and knocked them out just 
> because they
>   could. Yes, you can knock out vger, but this will only impact the 
> mailing
>   list -- people can still send around patches and hold discussions by
>   temporarily moving to alternative hosts. With the distributed nature 
> of the
>   mailing list archives, this can even be largely transparent to anyone 
> using
>   lei-queries.
> 
> - How to avoid alienating these hundreds of key maintainers who are now
>   extremely proficient at their query-based workflows? We're talking 
> about an
>   extremely finely-tuned engine that is performing remarkably well -- 
> we don't
>   want to disrupt development for months just to try things out with a 
> forge
>   and find that it isn't working out.
> 
> Finally, there's also the consideration of current trends. One upside 
> of "AI"
> (LLM, really) technologies is that they are extremely good at taking in 
> a huge
> source of data and finding relevant information based on natural 
> language
> queries. I can very easily see a mechanism spring up in the next year 
> or less
> where you can issue a query like "send me any threads about reftables 
> or
> promissory remotes if they contain follow-ups from Junio" and reasonaly 
> expect
> this to work and work great -- all while keeping things decentralized 
> in
> addition to distributed.
> 
> Above all, this isn't a "forges are terrible and shouldn't be used" 
> response
> -- they are clearly useful, especially when it comes to CI 
> integrations. A
> large part of my work is bridging forges with mailing lists and 
> vice-versa,
> which I hope I'll be able to do in the near future (GitGitGadget 
> already does
> it with GitHub, but my goal is to have a pluggable multi-forge 
> solution). I
> just wanted to highlight the aspects that aren't necessarily obvious or
> visible from the outside.

Thank you very much for taking your time to write this down!
Much appreciated.