OpenWrt and GitHub

[Daniel Golle]

Hi Paul,

On Sat, Jun 05, 2021 at 10:20:49AM -1000, Paul Spooren wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> After a request by some developers in #openwrt-devel I added a Signed-off-by
> check (DOC) to our GitHub presence, since it's one of the most common formal
> issues. This is a handy piece of CI to waste less human time in reviews.
> 
> Speaking of more CI, it's been two nearly two years since Lynxis and mine
> idea to bundle up things to a self hosted GitLab instance rather than using
> a wild mix of tooling[1]. Since then some things happened, but the overall
> the situation is the same as two years ago. Nobody seems keen to setup and
> maintain a GitLab instance for OpenWrt.
> 
> Should we stall that plan and reevaluate if a (temporarily) gitlab.com
> hosted instance is the better way to proceed?

In that case I strongly prefer github.com over gitlab.com.
Despite github.com being owned by Microsoft, they haven't yet actively
done anything harming users or projects. They sure do collect a lot of
metadata, which I'd rather not want to give them...
gitlab.com has activaly destroyed gitorious.org only weeks after
acquiring the service. All projects were inaccessible from one day to
another, wiki and pages were NEVER restored, repositories were restored
more than a year later (!) by archive.org.
For me it is very clear that I do not want to depend or work with
anyone who has shown this kind of attitude in the past (and never even
publicly apopogized for it).

If you haven't heard about that story, please read up and inform
yourselves, and feel free to ask me (I was mainly using gitorious.org
by the time it was been acquired and destroyed by gitlab.com)

> 
> Next to CI, the issue tracking is a bit of a mess. In theory everything
> should go to bugs.openwrt.org, but since it doesn't support a lot of bells
> and whistles users distribute their issues to the forum and GitHub commit
> comments[2].
> 
> Could it make sense to use the GitHub issues rather than Flyspray? Different
> from Flyspray the GitHub issues support an API, CLI and also a way to export
> issues, unlike Flyspray where it needs HTML parsing or SQL plumbing.
> 
> I'm not a fan to freely promote a commercial service but since nobody is
> excited about doing extra administrative work on a GitLab instance, why not?
> We relay on commercial entities anyway (e.g. Hetzner) and migrating a VM
> from provider A to B might just be as annoying churn as plumping "old
> service API" to "new service API".
> 
> tl;dr: Use GitHub issues instead Flyspray? Use GitLab.com with some CI? Do
> nothing?

... or just have someone else run a gitlab instance for us?
And what about sourcehut? Wouldn't that be a good option as well?


> 
> Best,
> Paul
> 
> [1]: https://openwrt.org/meetings/hamburg2019/start#defragmentation_of_code_and_tools
> [2]: https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/commit/2cd1a108290f48fd35373f91056c05277c289687
> 
>
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