Re: mintty project

[Eric Blake <eblake at redhat dot com>]

On 06/01/2015 10:14 AM, Achim Gratz wrote:
> Thomas Wolff writes:
>> I'd like to discuss what you (cygwin maintainers and others) think of
>> this move, whether it's good for mintty to be hosted on
>> github.
> 
> The first thing should really be to find out what Andy Koppe thinks
> about this, or is there any information about his whereabouts that says
> he's abandoned his project (other than the long silence)?
> 
> And that question of yours is moot since mintty already is on GitHub, in
> 26 different forks.  Most of them are "Automatically exported from
> Google Code." and some not even fully up-to-date.  Then closest to
> Cygwin is the one from cygwinports (Yaakov).  Two of them simply dropped
> the history and only three of them have non-trivial commits.
> 
>> Personally I feel that a platform like sourceforge provides a
>> more professional project environment which would provide more
>> confidence in stable project development.
>> What do you think?
> 
> Sourceforge has been deteriorating for at least the last two years and
> personally I don't like the lock-in that GitHub tries to sneak upon its
> users.  I certainly won't register with GitHub just for reporting an
> issue in one of their projects.

I personally avoid github; it encourages the use of proprietary code
(the bug tracker and pull requests are not based on free software);
while it can be used for a free software project (by hosting bug reports
elsewhere, and using a mailing list rather than pull requests for
merging in patches), it is never my go-to solution for an upstream
project hosting site.  I'm fine with github serving as a mirror to make
downstream forking easier and to increase mindshare among developers
that aren't as picky about free software, but I'd much rather use an
upstream site that does not encourage the use of proprietary software.

See for example how libvirt is using github merely as a read-only
mirror: https://github.com/libvirt/libvirt

-- 
Eric Blake   eblake redhat com    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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