[copyleft-next] Use of Gitorious and GitHub

Richard Fontana fontana at sharpeleven.org
Fri Nov 30 21:02:52 UTC 2012


On 11/30/2012 03:19 PM, Ben Cotton wrote:
> If I may set aside the philosophical issues for the time being, I
> think the better starting point is to ask "what do we need?"
> 
> Obviously, we need a git repository. Do we need an issue tracker? I
> like the idea, but Ted has spoken against using anything except the
> mailing list for communication. 

I forgot about looking into some sort of issue tracking solution,
which may indicate that one really isn't necessary. Back in the days
of "GPL.next" and GitHub there was something worthwhile about the
rudimentary GitHub issue tracker (however inadequate it might be for
an actual software project). I'd link to an interesting example,
bkuhn's bug arguing that GitHub shouldn't be used for copyleft license
development, but GitHub is down at the moment!

> Are there other features we want? If
> all we need is a git repo, then maybe moving off of Git{orious,Hub}
> and putting the repo on fedorahosted is the way to go. Then there's
> not much of a UI at all.

I thought about this. In fact, I am also 'mirroring' copyleft-next here
http://git.fedorahosted.org/cgit/copyleft-next.git/
(hmm, that project description is way out of date!)

Sadly, to be candid, this is essentially why I set up the fedorahosted
repository: I wanted to have a conventional free software mailing list
for this project. I tried setting up GNU Mailman but had various
difficulties making it work with a mail server, which I found quite
frustrating because it seems like the sort of thing that ought to be
simple. (In fact, because GNU Mailman is so widely used but also so
horribly designed, I'm thinking of writing my own mailing list manager
software which could then be licensed under copyleft-next.) I knew
that with git repository hosting at fedorahosted I could also get a
Mailman list thrown in.

However, I do not want to associate copyleft-next in any way with
Fedora (or Red Hat). The problem with fedorahosted is that it creates
the sense that there is some connection with Fedora. (That is not why
fedorahosted was originally set up, as historical research makes
clear, but in practice it is now mostly used by projects either
closely tied to Fedora or closely tied to Red Hat.) Indeed, I see the
fedorahosted.org hosting of this mailing list as a temporary measure.

And after about a half hour or so of experimenting with the Trac
instance I got from fedorahosted I decided that was not going to be
workable. :)

> Is there a marketing aspect to be considered here? GitHub is pretty
> visible, and it might help draw more people to copyleft-next if it's
> hosted on GitHub.

Yes, that is that 'tertiary attractiveness' I referred to. That's the
primary benefit of GitHub (at this point in time).



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